I’m sitting quietly, listening closely for any message that wants to arrive. But more so, just enjoying the sound of the stillness that surrounds me, against the traffic and conversations of Brooklyn life outside.

I am at the end of a busy week and in the earliest part of a new chapter.

For the past year, I shared this railroad apartment with a friend and I lived in the middle room. Her door shut most of the time for my own privacy, the space less free-flowing because of it. Now the apartment is mine again, and I’m so struck by how much relief I feel. My nervous system is exhaling in gratitude for the peace shining through what are now my office windows in the form of sunlight on a Saturday.

And I’m thinking about how life so perfectly reflects the world within us. In so many other parts of my life, I was also in the middle room. I had healed from heartbreak, but I still couldn’t imagine a relationship that inspired me. I was a contractor, waiting for the job to become fully mine. So much of the past year was lived in that in-between, physically and emotionally.

And now there is such a gorgeous quiet. The space to spread out has arrived. But sitting here, I realize the new chapter didn’t begin when the room opened up. It was already unfolding, just as everything before it had unfolded in its own perfect timing.

I said I was in the earliest part of a new chapter. But I think what I mean is that I am finally able to see the chapter I’m already in.

Everything is in constant conversation, every part of life talking to every other part, moving us toward exactly where we’re meant to be. For me, the disruption only comes when my ego takes the wheel. When my uncertainty curdles into fear. When I grip and cling and try to anticipate an ending before it’s ready to appear and in doing that, miss the magic that was already on its way.

The key to living the life of your wildest dreams is surrender.

You hold the thing you want close, like the last inhale of a meditation. And then, you let it go.

You come back to the present moment, to reality.

Presence is a prayer.

What if we poured ourselves into now as if now were the thing we’d been longing for?

Because we pour ourselves into all kinds of things.

Relationships and other people.
Work and the illusion of careers.
Belief systems.
Ideas about who we’re supposed to become.

And still, so often, we’re not fulfilled.

I think it’s because the pouring is conditional.

If I give myself to this person, I’ll be loved the way I want to be loved.
If I give myself to this work, I’ll become successful.
If I do everything right, eventually I’ll arrive at the life I’ve imagined.

We make a transaction with a future that doesn’t exist.

A fantasy.

And in doing so, we make the present moment a means to an end. Something to get through. Something that only matters because of where we think it might take us.

But this is the life that’s actually happening.

Surrender is not the absence of desire.

It is knowing what you want. Wanting it badly, even. And releasing your grip on how, or when, or whether it has to happen.

Trusting what is unfolding in front of you more than the future you’ve constructed in your mind.

You can have a vision for your life without abandoning your life for the vision.

Hold the desire.

Then come back to now.

It’s been a few weeks. Longer than I typically take between writings, and there’s been a lot of change. A lot of my life opening beyond the limits that I once set for it. I used to be able to see the edge; now it’s beyond my line of vision.

And so, I’m thinking about expansion.

I’m thinking about how life responds after you’ve asked for more of it. After you’ve prayed in the morning and through the day for more and more life, and I don’t mean time, I mean energy, I mean life force.

Let’s say you do this for 18 months. Life watches you through those months to see how your actions match your requests, until finally it says, OK, you’re ready. You’ve stretched yourself beyond the walls of your old capacity. You have reached + stretched + worked with what you had until you’ve shown life — but even more importantly, yourself — that you are ready for more. You’ve outgrown the boundaries of your old life and you need more space. You need a new limit, one that you can’t see from where you’re seated today.

And then it meets you, and for a moment you experience relief. Because you can feel yourself being met. You can feel the stretch after a long period of feeling cramped in the middle seat of life.

But then you notice something: you’re not just being met enough to fit your new size, your unfurling self. You are being met with more. Life says, here is extra, because you’re not done. You need something to grow into, not fit into.

So, it gives you enough that you know you’ll be here for some time. And it comes with a new kind of discomfort — because that is the price of growth. Now, rather than fighting for your life to nearly fit within this space, you’ll be anxious to fill it.

And then, as you sit alone in a coffee shop thinking about how anxious you are to fill the new space as fast as possible, life says to you: My love, remember when you moved into your new apartment and the extra walls of a bigger space stayed bare and empty and you felt an urgency to cover them? Until you asked yourself — what’s the rush? The right pieces will come. You’ll know them when you see them. And you have everything you need to get started.

The bed, the dresser, the couch of your old place will make for the perfect foundation here. You have what you need, and your new home will be built over time. Everything good takes time. Everything worth it requires patience.

The empty walls of your new life aren’t any different.

Take the train in the morning to a place you’ve never been.

Walk the sidewalks of a different Brooklyn neighborhood before everyone’s awake, and listen to that song from the coffee shop you Shazamed months ago and forgot about.

Do this on a gray Saturday.

The kind that reminds you of who you were fifteen years ago, when you would’ve done anything to live in an apartment like yours. When you would’ve done anything for the life you have now —a life full of people who love you, and a sense of security built from the inside out.

You might think about Melinda.

How she’d sleep under her desk after nights out. How that girl broke her heart badly enough that the two of you ended up in Miami, watching a Marilyn Monroe documentary and HGTV, trying to distract yourselves from life's aches.

It’s funny how memory works.

It lets heartbreak become a documentary playing in the background of a hotel room. It lets a gray morning in Brooklyn hold fifteen years at once.

But now we’re talking about something else, aren’t we?

Not New York.

Time.

The way it keeps moving us forward while simultaneously asking us to remember who we were.

So go.

Take the train to a place you’ve never been. Walk those unfamiliar sidewalks slowly.

Think about the twenty-three-year-old who would’ve given anything for the life you’re absentmindedly living today.

I find myself waking to the light kisses of its sunrise—
daybreak rustling into bed with me,
breathing affirmations in my ear.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am swaying to its rhythm
by the window in my kitchen,
the longer days remind me
to drink my coffee slowly.

In lieu of a summer fling
My legs dangle off the edge of a terrace in the park
as I bite into a peach the color of sunset,
sticky and delightful in the warm air.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am wrapped in the strong arms of its heat,
dampened by its embrace.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am dancing with its moonlight,
intoxicated by deep inhales of jasmine
and the buzzing of my own body.

In lieu of a summer fling
I’m having conversations with its towering sunflowers,
asking for their guidance
their faces reaching for the sky.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am glowing in the golden hour
reflected in the windows of the Brooklyn Museum.

In lieu of a summer fling
I smell like sun-warmed linen and sunscreen
after a swim in someone’s pool and a nap on the couch.

In lieu of a summer fling
I hear laughter through the open windows
of my neighbors having dinner with their friends visiting from far away.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am forgetting what day it is
Saying yes to late night dinner reservations
and no to leaving early.

In lieu of a summer fling
I am the good kind of tired
In a season that always ends too soon.

I’m imagining everything my soul agreed to before coming into this human experience.

I’m imagining the elders—powerful, tall, beaming—telling her that because of where in the cosmos she came from, she was destined to feel deeply. Perhaps she came from one of the brightest stars. Perhaps she was among the first rays of light to touch the earth after God spoke. Or perhaps she was born from the moment the universe longed to know itself—a heartbeat inside that longing, an expression of it.

They told her that as a sensitive soul, being human would sometimes hurt in ways other people wouldn’t understand. That she’d be impressed upon by people and places. That she’d love recklessly. Lose things she thought she couldn’t survive losing. Feel joy so complete it would make time disappear.

And she couldn’t wait.

She was overjoyed to come here.

She accepted every heartbreak before it happened. Every goodbye. Every uncertainty. Every moment that would ask her to choose love over fear. Not because suffering was the point, but because remembering was.

She knew she’d be shaped by this life. But somewhere, buried beneath all the living, there would remain a flicker of recognition. A knowing that she wasn’t only the body living the experience, but also the witness who had chosen it.

Sometimes I wonder why I can’t remember so much of what’s happened.

Whether time erases things, or the heartbreak of ending does.

And yet I remember what mattered.

The memories fade, but the lessons don’t.

The lessons are impressed upon us while the memories—the people, the places, the stories that carried them, slowly blur into softer versions of what they once were, even when we wish to hold onto them forever.

So, after forty years, I think I’ve learned one thing so far.

Not to cling.

Not to time.

Not to people.

Not to money.

Not to places.

Not even to life itself.

Nor to a notion of the divine.

Because every time I’ve loosened my grip—or rather, every time life has peeled my fingers away despite my resistance, I’ve discovered the same thing waiting to catch me underneath.

Love.

We spend our lives afraid to let go because we don’t know where we’ll land.

But the landing has always been love.

It is always love.

For my friend Natasha, who has understood me since day one. Pretty sure I chose you, too.

I’ve been thinking about your answer
to the question I asked
in your Mother’s Day card this year.

Who do you think we were
before this life?

You said
you were the teacher
and I was the student.

And now,

I’m teaching you

everything

you once taught me.

A reminder
of who you used to be.

It got me thinking
about how lifetimes
aren’t always so distant.

How, in many ways,
we live hundreds
in this one alone.

When I was little,
you had every answer.

Will I be okay?

Yes.

Will my heart heal?

Yes.

Will he come back?

They always do.

And a hundred other questions
girls ask
before they become women—

which sometimes
takes much longer
than we’re told.

And now
I find myself
responding not to questions,

but to the fears
hidden inside
the things you say.

Over text.

Or on the phone.

“I hope things work out.”

They will.

“It’s different when you’re older.”

Life is on your side.

“I just want you and Matthew to be happy.”

It’s up to us now.

And I wonder
if our souls know
this part is coming.

Not that one of us
stops teaching.

Only that,
at some point,
we begin reminding each other.

Because when I called you that day,
crying
about my friend
who had lost her dog
just before her first baby was born
and the day before her birthday,

you still knew exactly what to say.

You still knew
how to be my mom
in the exact way
that I needed.

So maybe
motherhood isn’t something
we grow out of.

Maybe it’s a well
that never empties.

Maybe it simply changes
the way it flows.

You spent so much of your life
filling me.

Maybe now,
without either of us noticing,

I’ve started
filling you too.

Not because
you need me
to be your mother.

But because love,
if we’re lucky,

keeps finding
new directions
to travel.

My angels talk to me through the trees.

I have a new dream, and at first I felt everything good that accompanies the unexpected sweetness of a dream. Awe and amazement. Passion and planning. Possibilities expanding. A lot like those first moments of falling in love, when everything is right and we wonder how we didn’t see it all along.

And then I gripped tightly to my new dream, and it started taking more life from me than it was giving—all within the span of a few days. So as my breath shortened and the space behind my breastbone tightened, I thought, prayer will help.

Sometimes I can’t find the words, so I trust God to read my heart. This time, the words were just too many.

My busy mind became a sticky trap.

What if I’m too late?

What if it’s not meant for me?

What if I want something life doesn’t want me to have?

With every fearful thought, I drifted further from the awe that had arrived with the dream.

So, to get some quiet, I went to the park near my home with a small blanket, a pen, and a notebook. I lay in the grass and looked at the trees until they signaled to me that they were ready to speak.

In a chorus of rustles and sways, conducted by their dear friend the wind, they acknowledged my presence and began to form their committee, together consulting on the heavy breaths I’d been exhaling.

One nodded its branches toward me. Another shook gently from side to side. Then, as if to remind me that none of this was quite as serious as I was making it, one gave itself a little shimmy.

I smiled. I’ve always loved their sense of humor.

Then, taking turns, with a loud and loving tone, they told me the important things my heart already knows, but somehow forgets in this day-to-day experiment of being human.

“Sheena, sweet love...

Look.

No, really.

Look.

Look at your life.

Today.

Not tomorrow.

See how much of what you’ve asked for is already arriving, in perfect time.

You’re already rushing past what you’ve been praying for because something new has occurred to you.

Why not trust that this dream was on your path long before your mind caught up to it?

Why not believe we’re already paving the way?

You can trust our timing.

Look at us.

We have never hurried a season.”

I lay there for a while after they finished, watching, breathing, remembering.

And it occurred to me that somewhere in the span of those few days, I’d convinced myself it was my job to keep the dream alive. As if, should I stop thinking about it for even a moment, God might forget. As if worrying were helping.

But that’s not the invitation.

The invitation is to participate in what’s right in front of me, because that’s where my life is.

That’s the only place my life has ever been.

And maybe it’s to pray too, because prayer reminds us of what we already know.

Maybe it’s to notice all of this, and to participate in it.

Then, to return to the unfolding.

Hold the questions lightly.

Trust they’ll be answered without my constant attention.

Trust that I don’t have to keep the dream alive.

So,

I came across some messages I’d saved between us from around this time last year.

Just after that night at my place,
when you stayed over.

In one of them, we talked about how things would eventually get easier.

How it would take time.

The way time seems to slow whenever we’re waiting for pain to end.

But things did get easier.

And now, a year out, I can hardly believe the weight of what that season held.

You knew this then, but I had been in a serious financial struggle—unemployed, then barely working, then earning far below what I was worth.

When you and I started spending more time together, it became a kind of refuge. I held onto it as the one thing in my life that felt like relief.

I’m someone who deeply trusts life.

Things were just so hard in more ways than one,
and the heartbreak of it nearly took me out.

But it didn’t.

What followed became part of something much larger.

Looking back, it feels like life had been whispering the same thing to me over and over, and then finally, with you, it said it plainly:

Sheena, you have to learn this now, so you can have the life that’s meant for you.

The lesson was simple,
even if living it wasn’t:

Every time I choose myself,
I’m choosing the greater path.

The unknown can feel so daunting,
even when we sense its fullness.

So we spend a little longer trying to make what isn’t aligned become aligned.

But alignment doesn’t bend to will.

It just is.

Or it isn’t.

Since then, I’ve stepped into a new phase of life—a truer, wider version of myself and the way I move through the world. Something I couldn’t have fully imagined before.

Sometimes I wonder if the regard you held me in was for this version of me.

The one I hadn’t quite grown into yet.

The one I kept making myself smaller than,
hoping staying within reach would be enough to keep things going between us.

I’m sharing all of this to say:

Look how things pass.

Everything changes.

Always.

Life really does have our best interests at heart, even when it feels like we’re being dragged through the mud.

Somehow, it keeps carrying us exactly where we’re meant to go.

With love,

Sheena

We still lived in the townhouse.

I was ten
maybe eleven—

that age between
elementary school
and whatever comes next.

You were in your early 30’s

An age I now know
is younger than it sounds.

Still, you were already a father.

My father.
A father of two.

We were pulling into the driveway.

You reached for the mailbox
the way you always did—

driver’s seat,
arm out the window.

There was something for me.

Mom was there.
Matt was there.

I was in the back seat
on the passenger side.

But when I remember it now,

I only remember you.

I think you asked
if I wanted to open it.

I handed it back.

You read.

Sheena Vega,

Congratulations on your acceptance
to Middle School of the Arts—

Before you finished,

you shouted:

ARIGHT, GIMME FIVE!

For reasons I can no longer explain,

I wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken.

So we got it.

Drumsticks dipped
into mashed potatoes,

eaten in the car,

the whole world suddenly
exactly right.

To this day

it remains one of the best days
of my life.

Not because I got in.

Because I made you proud.

And I knew it.

Not knew—

felt it.

Now I’m forty,
going on forty-one.

You’re sixty-one,
going on sixty-two.

It’s a strange thing,
being a daughter.

You spend years wanting
to make your father proud.

Then life asks something else of you.

To choose yourself.

To leave the road he imagined.

To follow the one
calling your name.

Life turns out to be short.

Short enough that a mailbox,
a letter,

a paper bucket of chicken,

can survive decades.

Short enough that love
can fit inside a single, shouted sentence.

ARIGHT, GIMME FIVE!

And even now,

when I hear it,

part of me still reaches
for your hand.

While the rest of me

keeps walking

toward my own yes.

Apartments that feel like mansions on Central Park West —

doormen who flirt

Meeting men in coffee shops and falling in love in an afternoon

You.

Getting lost in Central Park

and ritual magic

Opening. Opening again, and then a little more.

Laughing in bed about things we can’t remember

Crawling around on your grandma’s soft carpet

Trying on gold

Feeling like royalty in sweatpants

The way you looked at me in the kitchen that night

and said, “I could be with you”

I love God,

cashmere and gold

I love remembering

you

I remember —
tie-dye, scrunchies
eyeliner done in the bathroom
only if I bumped into that one friend
who carried it in her backpack
wiped off just before I hit my bus stop

It all feels dreamlike now

And then — their words reach me
almost in sync
but just a little off
enough to feel the shape of the circle without being inside it

Things they love, things they trade, things they pool their allowance for on a Saturday

Hair clips
Clap clap clap

And for a second

Lip gloss
Clap clap clap

I’m there too

Secrets and sleepovers
Clap clap clap

BOYS!

And I know every word

Sometimes there are no words so I trust god to read my heart.

In the darkness of my room there’s a divine exchange between everything unspoken and everything unanswered, and you.

Too big to name but many names just the same.

Love might be the closest, but even love is just a door.

In the soft dark that cradles me, I can no longer tell if my eyes are opened or closed.

A voice that doesn’t use words. I listen.

To be seen.

This is what my heart has been circling. A feeling so many of us long for, and it sounds quite simple when declared as a desire — I want to feel seen — or even as an experience — I felt seen. The words are small. The thing they’re pointing at is not.

Yesterday I met up with a beloved friend around 3pm to explore what we actually mean by that. What began over tea and slices of baked banana bread in his apartment — the rooms glowing with spring light, brightened by his collection of loved-on plants — turned into five hours of conversation that spilled all the way to a chilly dinner on a Brooklyn sidewalk. We moved from “feeling seen” to what it means to admire, and through all the feelings that live in between.

Pain might be the closest word for what happens in the intensity of being seen. The sudden, overwhelming expansion — like something in you has been waiting a long time to unfurl. And for a moment the self expands beyond its usual borders. You have everything, can do anything. It all feels like a portal. But underneath, there’s an urgency, because you can already feel it beginning to close, the edges drawing back in. You can’t live inside a portal. You can only pass through.

Maybe being seen is the experience of being reflected back to yourself with enough clarity that you remember who you are.

When it happens, it feels like an ancient discovery. Something I had been missing without realizing it — something long forgotten from another time that has suddenly resurfaced. It feels like oh, there you are. A reunion, not just with the person doing the seeing, but with the version of myself that only exists when someone is truly witnessing me.

We talked about this for hours, circling the feeling from different angles, and I kept returning to a night a week earlier when I had felt it unexpectedly — not in private, but in a crowded room.

My friend is a wonderfully talented musician and poet, almost always creating something beautiful — it’s simply how he moves through his life, surrounded by people doing the same. He had a performance last week in an intimate space filled with spirit. I felt lucky to be there. I looked around at who I was in the company of: artists and helpers with big hearts and conscious minds, aware of themselves and how they move through the world. Gorgeous people, dressed in colors and fabrics assembled as carefully as the art they create. Expression was everywhere. The room hummed with beauty.

For a moment I thought: my friend knows some truly exceptional people. And then, arriving in a whisper behind that thought, another one: I must be one of them.

That second thought is the whole thing. That is what being seen does — it reminds you of what you are.

There was something happening in that room beyond admiration. Something collective. The feeling seemed to move between us, enlarging each person it touched.

If the divine is water — a river, an ocean, an unlimited supply of flow — then we are the faucets. Chosen as vehicles to express something larger than ourselves. We don’t have to worry about the source. We only have to open.

My friend, playing piano at the front of the room, singing songs he wrote from the heart, reading poems just as lyrical — he is a fountain. An expression of love as abundance. And that night, as we all listened and held still, something in the room magnified. Our reflective surfaces mirroring each other, the room became a waterfall.

You cannot stay inside the moment of being seen. No one can. The waterfall ends. The room empties. Everyone returns to their separate lives. But once it happens, something remains. You carry an illuminated memory of yourself afterward, something part of you already knew.

Maybe that is all we can ask of one another — not permanent understanding, not complete possession, but moments of clear reflection. Still water reflecting the sun. Brief openings through which we remember ourselves more fully before the portal closes again.

For a moment, someone holds up a mirror polished enough to reflect your deepest self back to you, and afterward you remember: oh, there you are.

This week I found myself inspired by the life I get to live. When I’m present enough, I find myself here — this place of illumination, where everything that’s always been in plain sight brightens. Heaven reflected on Earth. The way our outer world shows us everything already within us.

A few things came to me throughout the week. Pearls in the ocean of my thinking. Each one a different way of returning.

Early in the week I was hit with the magnificent time capsule that music is — and more than a time capsule, a way to return to a past version of myself and be with her for a while. To touch a part of myself that seems far away but is actually right there, singing along to a song she loved or cried to or screamed her lungs out to in her Suzuki Sidekick, at 16, windows down, sobbing — not fully understanding where all the rage was coming from, but knowing there was an entire world trying to convince her she was less than what she knew she was. And she would not fold. I sat beside her this week. I let her know she was right. And I thanked Rilo Kiley and Radiohead for making the return possible.

When I came back to the present, I had a conversation with a woman about how much we love ourselves — and it was so natural to hear it spoken without shame, without whispering, without worrying about how it might land. Just natural. And it makes sense, because our nature is Love. Underneath all the extra stuff — the layers of learned self-criticism and cruelty, the not-enoughness, the reaching for anything other than our own truth — underneath all of that is Love. For ourselves and each other. Returning to it is the whole work.

Today is Mother’s Day. And I keep returning to what an honor it is — not just today, but in the ongoing dailiness of being a woman. I am in deeper and deeper awe of myself and everything I get to be, every day — and I can have this experience because of the women around me. The mothers and sisters and friends and fighters and survivors and lovers. The ones who stayed. The ones who showed me how. Our bodies hold the universe. Our eyes hold the oneness we all came from. We are. We are. I am, the I am.

It’s May now. This morning, on a walk to the grocery store, I noticed how quickly everything has turned green again. Almost like it happened overnight.

It was a long winter. Colder than I think I personally remember New York ever being. Arctic windchills. Obstacle courses of snow all around, dirtied by cars and littered by people. It felt like it would be like that forever.

And now it’s green.

The morning was so quiet I could hear myself breathing. I walked down a wide sidewalk and felt like the only person awake in Brooklyn, even though it was already 8am. At one point I slowed my pace and it got even quieter. I looked up. The clouds had their own halos from the sun behind them.

All of it — the green, the quiet, the aloneness, the glowing clouds — felt like a divine message. I put my hand on my heart and nodded. Received.

And then I thought about how grateful I am to know when something is trying to reach me.

Lately I’ve been watching my life expand. Something I’ve known all along has finally clicked into place — and it’s felt like a spell working.

The more I give my life, the more it gives me. The more it opens. The more creativity it brings in. The more loving people it generously offers me. The more light. The more beauty.

It’s as if my life is saying: I have a limitless supply of everything meant for you. It’s here for the taking — if you have an open hand.

Open hand. Open heart. Open eyes.

I spent the past few days asking for signs.

Ask God for a sign and then pay attention — is the advice I received years ago, and it never left me.

This week I walked to the park, to the gym, to the farmers market an hour away in a different neighborhood, the whole time talking out loud to God, asking for signs and then watching intently for a response — knowing divine languages vary and can be far more creative than words. Knowing too that often God speaks through others, honoring them as a microphone, a vessel, understanding that on Earth we’re most accustomed to speech, and so in order to meet us, the divine will reach us through each other — through the right mouth, at the right moment.

I listened to the birds, watched the sky and strangers’ faces, spoke with bodega clerks, memorized sidewalk chalk murals of trees and big, multi-colored letters spelling out I LOVE YOU, stayed present to surrounding conversations, and moved my body to songs playing in the distance.

An open ear. An open hand.

But it was all very quiet. No message seemed to come through. And then on Tuesday I walked to the park and this time my soft spoken prayers turned into frustration — spilled out of me, honestly, loud enough that a few people turned to look, but I didn’t mind the stares. I was too caught up in pleading my case, too restless, too tired of waiting— angry, fed up, pulling for guidance, checking my email for any signs to come through, a job posting response, an interview follow-up, only to find more no-reply rejection emails from companies I didn’t want to work for anyway.

And then I thought about the work I had made a mild attempt at starting years ago, how it was something I still thought about most days — a door I never fully closed or intended to. What would it take to revisit it?

And so I decided to take a step toward it, a small one, but a step. And then I continued my plea, — now tell me if I’m on the right track. Show me the way. I’ll leave New York City if that’s what you see for me, but I need you to meet me. I need you to be clear.

Later that day my new manager asked that we all take a strengths finder test. I had done ones like it before, but this one felt different — less about who I was and more about what I was built for, focused on finding innate talents rather than personality type.

My results read like a list a loved one had been keeping about me for years. Every single strength pointed in the same direction — toward the thing I’d been circling, the one I’d tucked away but never released. Not a surprise, exactly. More like a mirror.

And that’s when I understood that the question I’d been asking God all week — what should I be doing — wasn’t quite right. The real question was softer, more vulnerable than that: Can you support the path I already know is mine? Because I already knew. I have always known — most of realize this when we get very quiet and very honest. And God, rather than answering a question I hadn’t yet found the courage to ask clearly, had nudged me to take the step first — and then sent the confirmation after.

That evening I went to yoga with a girlfriend from my neighborhood. On our walk there I started sharing a bit about the strengths finder results, but then stopped — getting the sense it wasn’t ready to be spoken yet. The same way prayer is personal.

At the start of class our instructor began to tell a story about a girl she once taught as an elementary school teacher. She described the girl as a disruption, at times a terror, but she ultimately chose not to remove her from the class. At the end of the year, on her way out, the girl stopped at the instructor’s desk and handed her a small ceramic bowl she had made. “I didn’t know what else to give you, so I made you this,” she said, and left.

The instructor hadn’t expected a gift. Inspecting the bowl, she flipped it over to find an engraving etched into the clay: thanks for trying to like me.

She ended with a question: “What is your unique gift, and how will you share it with the world?” And there it was. Not a bolt of lightning. Just a question I already knew the answer to, spoken out loud by a stranger who had no idea she was delivering a message. As I stretched into our first position I felt the quiet accumulation of the day settle into my body.

Something bigger had been listening all along.

Years ago, I went out dancing with a girlfriend, before dancing was a part of my regular life and still felt intimidating, like my body wouldn’t know what to do.

And that night specifically, I decided not to drink any alcohol. I did that sometimes before I removed it from my life altogether. I’d have long stretches of no alcohol, and I’d feel more like myself in those stretches, which is why eventually a stretch turned into a lifestyle.

But this isn’t about that part.

This is about that night and what it led me to—my feet stomping the floor to an Israeli rock band in San Francisco, and feeling truly present in a way I hadn’t before.

There was nothing missing, and there was nothing that could have made it more full than it was. I remember having this overwhelming sense of—this is what I came here for. Here as in this earth.

I felt it in my body. The drums, my friend dancing beside me, the vibration of the band, the wood floor—everything all at once. I poured out myself while simultaneously pouring in. A kind of oneness that many of us call God, but no name can really hold.

After that, I didn’t know how to get back there, but I thought about it constantly.

I thought it was the band. I kept listening to their music, trying to return to that feeling, thinking if it was loud enough, I might be able to find myself in it again. I listened and listened and reached, the way we reach for anything that feels like it might open something in us again.

But it was nowhere to be found, because it wasn’t anything out there.

And I think this is what we’re all doing, in different ways.

Trying to find that feeling—the one where nothing is held, where you’re not managing yourself, where there’s no distance between you and what’s happening. We look for it in music, in people, in substances, in moments that feel close to it, because sometimes they do bring us near.

But they don’t create that feeling—that sense of being fully there.

Music, art, writing— these come from it, from someone who was open enough for something to move through them.

Everything else brings us close.

There are many doors.

But the door isn’t the place—it only opens into it.

What we’re actually reaching for is what’s left when something in us lets go—the freefall from our ego, from our fears, a trembling dive into the unknown, a deep breath and an exhale of trust, an unraveling of everything we were never meant to hold onto but did anyway, thinking it would cost us our lives.

What’s left is what we already are. What we’ve always been.

And I know this now because I’ve felt it so many times—first on a wood floor in San Francisco, my body knowing exactly how to respond to the drums and the guitar.

Just one door of many. And many more to come.

I was looking in the mirror. Really looking. The kind of looking you do when no one is watching and you’re not performing anything for yourself. Just my face, the soft light of my bedroom, the deep purple of my wool sweater and the quiet. Just me and the question of my life.

And I think I’m the most beautiful I’ve ever been.

Nothing that I’ve forced has remained.

Everything has eventually ended up where it’s supposed to be. If I’m not fighting upstream, if I’m allowing life to carry me, then I’m where I’m supposed to be.

And so that means that right now, at 40, I am not meant to have kids.

What does it mean that I’ve never really wanted them but I do wonder now what a life without them will be like — now that time is something I think about more. And what does it mean to be 40 and to have not met someone I feel aligned with. There is an ache in that. Not despair — I want to be precise about that — not grief exactly, but something quieter and more patient. A wanting that has learned to wait without curdling into bitterness. I don’t always know what to do with it so mostly I just let it be there, a small warm weight, proof that I still believe in something. What does it mean for this moment, and what does it mean for what’s to come.

Trusting life. This invisible thing that is also visible everywhere.

A loving force. The thing holding everything before me — the city, the lover, the friends, the career. Invisible and the most visible. There with me even when I dream.

Life. My ultimate partner. My breath. My intuition.

And I just hand it all over and say ok, let’s see what she does. She’s the lead and I’m the follow. I move when she moves. I go where she goes. I trust that she knows something I don’t.

I didn’t always trust her. There were years when I tried to outrun her, to get ahead of her, to arrange things into the shape I thought they were supposed to take. I held onto every person past their season and felt the shrinking the moment it started. Her signal to get out, her saying: this is too small for you. I said yes to things that were already over because I was afraid of what the space would feel like. And every single time, life was patient with me, waited until I exhausted myself, and then gently removed what wasn’t mine to keep.

It’s a vulnerable thing to trust life.

And yet here is what I know: it has never left me with nothing. Every ending has been a clearing. Every closed door has eventually revealed a room I didn’t know to look for.

What do I mean when I ask what does it mean? I think I’m asking what will unfold. I think I’m asking —

If not kids, what?

If not a husband by 40… what?

What I know is that it will be worth the while. What I’m doing is living the questions my heart is asking — to paraphrase Rilke. And so I will arrive at the unfolding. Not the answers, but more and more unfolding, if I just allow.

But honestly — if someone were to say do you want a husband? I'd probably say: what's a husband but something to call someone. What I want is a partner who adds to my life. Who meets me with a mirror. Who awakens something in me. Who loves his life as much as I love mine. Who prays to something, whatever it might be, and listens for a response by being still with himself.

I would love to be a part of someone’s solid ground when it feels like the floors drop out.

I would love to love the love someone has for themselves.

I would love to love. And I do — I love this experience, the dance I’m doing, the way life keeps asking me to trust her and I keep saying yes. I would love someone to join me.

But only if it means I gain more of myself. The dancing continues. The music still plays. The mirror brightens. The questions remain alive.

Surrender.

I’ve noticed this chapter of my life mirroring another from about six years ago. Aspects are remarkably similar — though so much of who I am has changed.

Has that ever happened for you? I say for you because it feels like a gift — a personal treasure map. Guiding you back to the undiscovered key you forgot you were already holding.

This week, amidst a busy mind and an unforgiving work week, I took time to listen to what this life might be trying to tell me. Convinced that if I intentionally created pockets in my day for receiving, the message and the guidance would come. What arrived were the parallels I’m sharing now. And with those parallels, a recalling of what had turned the page before. What had made the difference.

It was surrender.

The first time around, I made a deal with the powers that be. A season of uncertainty — career, direction, the particular ache of not knowing what came next. I said: I will be present to anything and everything you put before me. I’ll show up. I’ll hear it out.

And finally, I will choose authentically — whether or not it’s right for me.

I gave space for uncertainty. For the heavens to dance between me and my decisions.

I gave space, and I continued to build momentum through next right action. Action from trust. Action from a place of honesty with myself and the world in front of me. Not control — and so, not fear.

And it worked out. My life did what it always promises.

It fell into place. I was taken care of.

Thoroughly.

She had been leading me somewhere the whole time. My life — the one I’ve come to know as a river. Every closed door, every redirect — not cruelty, not chaos. Just her saying: no, not that way. Follow me. I know the way.

And suddenly, from the surrender, I found myself in a life-changing chapter. Which I believe I’ve entered again.

I can feel the pull of my new life. I can feel the current. And so I’ll let myself be carried.

Sun on my face, down the river.