This letter is for the one who is tired of all of their shoulds.

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The list is long: get a degree, but only if it’s going to be useful in the workplace. Get a job, work your way up. You only get half an hour for lunch, but that’s what everyone’s doing. Meet someone, but don’t settle. Travel, but don’t give up your career. Grow your community. Shop local. Have kids, but only if it fits into the timeline. Buy a house, or don’t, it’s a liability. Invest, but only if you can do it ethically. Eat seasonally. Don’t eat meat, avocados, coconuts, or palm oil. Read the ingredients. Spend below your means, but pay rent that is over 50% of your income.

The list goes on.

There is a noise pressing in on you that just won’t quit. Piercing, distracting, somehow very rational. So, for a moment, let’s put these imaginary checklists to the side. Turn down the volume on all those voices clamouring for your attention.

Listen!

Deep down, beneath the noise, a voice is whispering. It’s hard to hear it, but we often feel it, however subconsciously. That voice carries beautiful and true and vital things that shape all that we are.

It can be quite terrifying to stop and listen. Becoming curious about our inner voice often results in the death of decisions we have made based on external noise. What’s even more terrifying is never getting curious about that inner voice and living a life led exclusively by external pressures. It’s never really your own.

The most true, beautiful, and vital things about you are often quite hidden. Unless you regularly enter quiet and solitude, you risk missing those hidden things altogether. What a loss… to live an entire life without ever coming into contact with who you really are.

Don’t feel guilty for choosing life.

We are designed to live life in all its fullness. Fullness isn’t material wealth or accolades. Life. Perhaps it is coming to know the full expression of God within us. Fullness. Learning the braille of heaven written into creation. Learning to listen to the secrets hidden in our own souls.

What you long for reveals a facet of who you are. It reflects the goodness encoded into your being before the foundations of the earth were laid. What are the things that make you feel most alive? Choose that. Go the limits of your longing, as Rilke says.

Your heart felt longing for life in all its fullness is not a betrayal. It is a requirement. Longing is hard baked into this life of ours, so we may as well start now. Longing reveals something about our humanity. It reveals our deep ache. Longing shows us there is unfinished business!

Our journey towards God is one of becoming. It’s all that really matters. What you do does not matter in the way that becoming does. Focus on becoming. The doing will follow. Your becoming is shaped by all of the longings you choose to say yes to. It is altered by your refusal to stay curious about those same longings.

Life is a wild ride. Maybe it doesn’t feel wild enough for you right now, or beautiful enough, or silent enough. I am here to tell you that all of those wild, beautiful, silent things matter. Don’t forsake who you are because the shoulds of life crowd out your natural way of being in the world.

Take the risk. Say yes. See what happens as you allow things to unfold.

I stand in the clearing, beholding. It’s impossible to grasp the cacophony of greens, blues, greys all at once; so I let my gaze slowly ramble through fields, hedgerows, moorlands, forests.

I try to practice this habit daily. Every day I am greeted by the familiar. Every day I wonder how many miracles had to have occurred so that I get to stand here, gazing at all this damn beauty.

I moved here in the early spring.

It’s a single track lane, as are most in Devon. A strip of grass runs down the middle of this one, and I can almost hear the rumble of wooden carts that must have frequented this little parish years ago. The blue tin can I’m driving chugs along, louder than a tractor. The exhaust must be caught down below because if I accelerate a little too quickly, he chokes and coughs like a hacking smoker.

Mossy limbs reach up above me, clasping this ribbon of road between leafy fingers. Spring is just breaking and everything is liberally squiggled in colour. I trundle down past the church, turn left at the signpost, up past the alexanders waving, the oaks humming deep and true, and there it is: the quintessential storybook cottage. White washed walls, a thatched roof, and the inevitable roses climbing up the door frame. Past the gate, I turn steeply up a gravel track. Then it’s a two minute walk up the field and there, nestled up against oak and ash trees, sits my caravan.

This caravan, this spacious place, was a timely gift. I never, never planned on living in England long term. I didn’t grow up here, and always resented it being my passport country that never felt like home. I came to study herbal medicine, and planned to promptly leave after graduation. I hoped to travel and go on some Bilbo sized adventures, with the hope of finding somewhere that felt more like home.

I left in a massive harumph of bravery. One month later, however, I was offered a job in England that I could not refuse. This offer threw me completely. It was not a job that I had applied for, or asked for. In fact, my lovely landlady had made an opportune comment at an opportune time, and now I found myself with a job offer from one of the leading practitioners in my field. It was all a bit comical, in a miraculous and synchronistic way.

I know what it feels like to push doors that don’t really want to open. All of a sudden, it seemed like the doors were opening unprompted. Life was gaining a sudden momentum. I had a clear choice: go with the natural flow, or find another way.

There is a time to go against the flow, this did not feel like one of them. Very quickly, I knew if I were to say yes, this next season would need to look radically different than it had before leaving. Within a week, I had someone reach out to me about a flower farm… would I like to live there in a little caravan in exchange for menial rent and a few hours of work? (Are you joking?)

Safe to say, I returned to this fair isle. Life started reshaping very rapidly.

When we are young, we need the world in black and white. Certainty offers a safe home before we walk out into the grey of the world’s morning.

I don’t believe that maturity comes from more understanding, but rather, maybe it comes from the ability to open oneself up to the mystery of it all. To the things we cannot know or understand.

This is what I am learning here: everything exists all at once. The longing for home. The pain of loss. The love of that land. The love of this land. I am learning to live in the grey. To open my heart to mystery, to things that simply don’t make sense.

This trip is new. Let it unravel into its full form with no assumptions or judgements. Let it appear. It won’t look like what you have imagined. If it looks scary, unrecognisable, mysterious, or weird— that is okay. Nothing is wrong. You are exactly where you need to be.

It started with snow. White and wet.

Driving was precarious and I slid into this cotswold village in first gear whispering to myself “turn into the skid” all the way.

A few flu ridden nights later, I stand in the little box room, condensation on the windows, dehumidifier whirring the damp out of jeans before I leave. It seems an impossible problem— to dress for this place, and that place, simultaneously. It’s hard to imagine anything but the cold when it has its fingers around your throat and back and frigid feet.

In the end I settle for linen trousers, thermals, bulky jumper, and scarf. I pull on a puffer jacket, my arms jutting out overstuffed and awkward. Everything is jitters and shivers, and it’s not just the cold.

Car packed, windscreen de-iced, and sister hugged, we shudder out of town and onto icey lanes. The sun is golden and I feel cheated. It’s always the goodbyes when people throw on their best smiles and embrace and say the nicest things as if they didn’t really need to say them until now, but probably should now that you’re going. The sun is saying goodbye, I guess. Gleaming through white teeth. Whispering sweet nothings to the glittering ground. She could have come out and said it a few months ago, maybe things would have been different.

It’s easier this way.

Golden shadows beat past the car window. The lanes are silver halls, any leaves that remain hang like crystal lanterns. We don’t talk much.

Then we’re driving up to Gatwick and it’s all cement and metal. Car doors echo and suddenly I am regretting my linen decision… People say that “you should dress for where you are going”, but those people have obviously underestimated the sheer contrast between an english winter and a southern hemisphere summer.

It’s a tearful goodbye and I don’t want to go, don’t want to face being disapointed or grieved again.

The airport is always a safe middle, a retreat from an unpredictable world. Here, there, wherever, things are constant. Flouresents and slick floors and blinking screens. I find a chair overlooking the floor below. Maybe this is the safest I will ever be— in the perfectly preserved middle.

Then it’s the plane where everything is muted, crushed. Another middle, another hallway.

Baggage claim. Bag too heavy. Awkward hellos after years of silence. The drive is a blur. Everything familiar, everything uncomfortable.

The next week is itchy, like everything is wrong somehow. My skin feels too small. My smile too weak. My accent a betrayal.

Things turn after that first week. I drive out along misty cliffs towards Scarborough where everything is an expansive generosity. Armfuls of beauty tossed out before me.

Then feet on gravel, wood, sand. I press my soles into the ground I knew before any other ground. Two souls meeting.

White horses march, their sweaty spumes scattering on the icy blue road. The mountains growl gruffly lying in watch. Here, amongst the mountains, the waves, I am minute. A spec on a beach that stretches through eternity.

I am walking through deep time now. It wobbles and warps. Every edge, corner, boundary blurred. I am who I was and always will be. I am also the white sand, the waves, the hills, the mist. My soul has remembered its original covenant with the land it knew first.

Later, it’s all people.

It seems that I am standing within a centrifuge of love. It’s all faces, smiles, and hands reaching out. Eyes that know me, that saw me when I was not much of anything. These faces have more lines, but they are the same. All caught in that same deep time where everything exists all at once in one miraculous exhale.

I am caught within an endless embrace. A crush of people laughing, calling me by the name I was known as a child.

The layers of overlap grow, multiply. The similarities between us more numerous than the sand on that beach. Somehow we have all trodden the same tangled webs of road. All felt the twangs of loss, the invitation into deepening mystery.

We are deeply entangled through space and time. Our love a contraction that bridges all gaps.

There will always be a sense of otherness in this small life. The sense that things don’t fit, that something’s missing, that the dark will only reveal more darkness yet behind it. But somehow in the very non-linear remembrance of our belonging, we find integration. A coming together, a merging, a marriage.

Martin Shaw told me that one should make a covenant with limit.

This breathless minute that I have in this precious place is suffused with the sunrise colours of covenant. I remember the husband that I married, the one I intend to remain with all of my days.

He is the husband of time and place and mystery. Husband of miraculous beauty. Husband of belonging. Ultimately, the husband of limit.

I run through the next weeks— feet blistering on hot tarmac, gritty sand, buffalo grass. I race through my mental checklist, it’s a long one.

I drive for the first time here and it feels like another homecoming. I rent a little Hyundai I10, a beetle of a car, really. In it, I crawl through familiarity, trying it all on, seeing what fits. There is an urgency to the remembering. Relief in realising that this other world, this other me, still exists.

I surf for the first time. Awestruck by how the wave holds me. Utterly exhausted by the repetition of failure. It is a hilarious mixture of ecstasy and complete defeat. It feels like a pure mirroring of life. Get a beating, get back up again.

I go on one date. It is awkward, a solid 5/10 as dates go, not that I would know as it was my first (and last?). I guess I ask interesting questions, and struggle that others do not. I come away feeling elated and proud in the stepping out. There is marginal sense of disappointment that I didn’t just meet my future husband— that would solve a lot of my problems.

I swim in as many ocean gushes as I can, revelling in the piercing blue of the Atlantic. Each dip a baptism, a being made new all over again.

The return journey back to the land of green and grey is a vow renewal. Another kind of remembrance.

I am making a covenant with limit.

I am bound by time, bound by place, bound by love. Like glimpsing the blue feather of a magpie, I am becoming intimate with nuance and holding things in tension. Things are no longer black and white. They are somewhere in between. The veil is thinning; I am walking lines between worlds. I am the hinge, the corner, the crevice. I live both at the edges and the middle of all things.

This journey was less of a return and more of a deepening. A moving further in. Like walking the labyrinth, I am both further away, and far, far closer to the heart of my longing. After all, I am going to, as Rilke urges, the limits of my longing.

There is a seriousness to this life. But there are hands that hold us. Deep time that holds the memory of all things, reminding us that all of this, yes, has been felt before. This road that I walk is not new, it is ancient and worn with the treading of feet.

Go to the limits of your longing, my friend. See what meets you there, reaching hands up through the scatterings of time and place.

The blue door. The brass doorknob. The wreath I weave around autumn and Christmas. Then— muddy boots, coats, a smell like jute and pine. When the sun shines just right, the whole place lights up like a church, and the dust dances golden and shimmering.

The hallway: striped carpet, Cinderella staircase, more shoes, more clutter, but it’s lovely. The hallway where we had that big party. The whole place was filled with 50 people, most of us musicians. We played Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Bon Iver, and I’m not sure when I have been happier than dancing there with you.

Then the kitchen, and it’s colossal and warm and reminds me of France. A big sink and a seven-burner hob (one for each of us). The fridge is as big as a walk-in closet that flings blue light at midnight hours most nights. The table. The chairs. This winter, we spent hours foraging for the perfect lichen-covered stick to rest above the table. Old man’s beard draped like the mist over the morning lawn. This kitchen has seen dinner parties and tired morning faces and teary eyes and perceptive glances and prayers and apologies.

It has also seen goodbyes.

Now down two wooden steps that creak sometimes at 1 am when I sneak into the sunroom to watch the rain, and lightning if I’m lucky. The glass door that’s most often open— except that one time when one of us climbed through the window in the middle of the night to prove it could be done.

The garden. The grass. The red brick wall makes you feel like you’re in the real life secret garden. The roses that creep along the boiler house, and the purple wisteria that is more romantic than poetry. The cat, we named him Mango, but his real name is more dangerous, ill-suited for the orange blob that stares down clueless goldfish circling the pond. Lavender in the summer. Passion flowers, too. Cosmos dancing spindly and bright. Garden beds that are used to different hands folding over the soil each year.

From down here, you can look up to the second-floor and attic windows. Each frame is filled with life and movement. Someone sings. Someone is vacuuming, and the soft noise drones like a fly, lazy and unhurried. Someone is running up the Cinderella stairs now. Up there: bedrooms, a second kitchen, the boys’ bathroom, the girls’.

The bathroom (ours). Pink, orange, blue. A black and white dog on an orange canvas rests above the laundry shoot that you can (apparently) spit down all the way to the basement. We meet here some nights. Teeth brushing in warm light. Giggles when it’s late. Someone pees, another flosses. Intimacy that can’t exist anywhere else. (This is girlhood, by the way).

Then the boys’ bathroom, and I’m sorry to say, but I only felt the true weight of empathy after having to brush my teeth there for three consecutive nights. Freezing, draughty, perpetually damp. Bathmats flung in a crumpled heap. The faint smell of aftershave. A lock that clatters each night. Not much more to say here.

The upstairs kitchen is a boisterous retreat. Lunch time banter. Ships in the night and the afternoon.

My room is here. In the mornings, I smell coffee and onions. At night, I hear the washing machine tick. A room that was transformed from red carpet and bachelor brown… It’s white now, and warm, and the floorboards let noise bleed, but it’s nice to be reminded you’re not alone.

This room has watched me dance and doze and journal and pack and unpack. These walls leant an ear to complaints and worried groans. This bed held me and my sobs after heartbreak and late-night laughter. This door transmitted knocks and “dinner’s ready”. This sweet place was a sanctuary of my own. In my element: wood, dried flowers, whiskey bottle vases, and books.

There’s only one room left now. Barefoot down the stairs again. Pull a duvet up over the ears of the evening. Softly gather up nighttime essentials: a peppermint tea each, balls of wool, chocolate. The living room is something out of Little Women. Tall ceilings, a fireplace, a grand piano. French shutters and big windows that peer out onto the lawn. The mantlepiece decorated with last year’s pine cones. The Christmas tree next to the piano. We spent ages piecing it together. I still have a 30-minute video from a year ago of us putting it together in fits of laughter.

The red sofa will always be my favourite. It has the perfect depth:softness ratio. The blue sofa is now turquoise, but my memory will always be of socked feet and bodies supine on navy fabric. We meet here at night. On long nights when the light fades at four, we gather extra early and watch The Durrels, or Clarkson’s Farm. In the summers, we talk late into the night with doors flung open to the smell of sweet grass and dandelions. We’ve laughed here. Lazed here. Embraced. Mourned. Sung. Prayed.

If the kitchen is the heart, this room is the pulse. The rhythm of our days. Each one marked by the steady thud: mug down, lights dimmed, needles click, voices hush, movie murmurs. This room is a well we draw from every night. It’s lovely in morning light, but it somehow feels illegal to be there in the day. It’s like a secret only shared after the sun has set and all guards of the day are down.

So this is where I will leave you: curled up in your chosen seat, warm tangle of bodies, laughter pressed into cupped hands. Feet soon troop over carpeted floors to the four corners of the house. Lights are checked. Bathroom doors clatter. Toothbrushes buzz. Muffled voices on phones to friends. I’m gazing up from the garden, and it’s all golden and lovely, and soon curtains are flicked across windows and bedroom lights clicked off.

In a few months, maybe, I will pull the doorbell, which will resound throughout the house. Maybe one of you will come out of the backroom where we work sometimes. Maybe I will trundle up the stairs with heavy bags and unpack in a new room and shut a new door. Maybe we will meet in the kitchen at breakfast and ask each other how we slept, what we dreamt of. Maybe there will be new faces, new stories to learn.

Whether I have a day or a decade more of this, the memory will remain as sweet and untouchable as it is today. Here, I learnt to belong somewhere new. I learnt that home is expansion and belonging is vast. Place is always intermingled with people— they are indistinguishable, really.

So I bless this home, this deep, deep well. May new life continue to spring from it— flooding the tarmac roads and hedgerow lanes and river lapped banks. May it spread its eaves wide, lifting its skirts to run haphazardly through the streets. May it love generously, not holding back. May its roots run deep, offering nourishment to all who enter here.

With love,

Keziah x

Let it. Let it hurt. Let it agonise you. Let it churn up anger and regret. Let yourself be angry, I know you are desperately, fiercely angry. Let yourself be wild and unkempt. Let the feelings pass through you— for they are not part of you (although they may feel like an extension of yourself).

What is it you long for? There is goodness on the other side of this chaos. I know you are afraid. Lean in, my love. Let the pain be painful. Let the joy reach its fullness. Let yourself grieve, for when it’s time, you will have the opportunity to let it go and in turn you will be released into more fullness than your grief permitted you to believe for. There are always deeper things at work. Let it.

I am writing this in Ireland as the rain mists my windows. Ireland seems to collect those longing for roots and a sense of home, and so, here I am. The sky is grey, the mist hangs limply over sodden land. With each passing year I spend in the UK, the cold worms its way deeper down. It’s down to the bone now and I am frigidly tired.

Two days earlier…

We parked our car on oil slicked decks, emerging into carpeted lounges of dozing passengers. After wrangling four chairs, we made ourselves at home in a corner next to blaring football screens and the sound of grinding coffee machines.

The ferry to Dublin from Holyhead was chaos. Outside was relief.

The ocean spray was cool as the boat chugged from its dock leaving the port lights blinking in our wake.

Two red rimmed funnels stood at the rear exhaling glugs of smoke as seagulls caught the thermals, tailing us like airborne guardians.

The rails were slick with dew. Plastic benches stood sodden.

The sea and sky were radiant. The sun did not glisten, but sank; a warm orange globe shrouded by cloud. Waves tossed and danced, their white manes caught by the fading light.

I love ferries, simply for the vital opportunity of standing on deck and being with the sea.

She is wild; even in the mildest of places. She reminds me who I am. To gaze into the sea is to see deep time in action. Looking into her ocean depths is to be present with all of time at once.

Deep time seems to do that… remind us that we stand in the fleeting grey in-between.

As I stood and gazed out at the blue-black expanse, grief came and stood with me by that white railing and we watched together as the sky faded to black. Sea salt mingled with tears.

I think I am sad for all the times I have worked to embrace a place and not been embraced in return.

I truly try to be where my feet are. To be present to the place I am in, not chasing the sunsets of fantastical timelines. I try to live rooted, grounded in the soil in which I find myself, not rushing to be repotted prematurely.

As my sadness bubbles, I realise that I am tired of working so hard to be where I am. It’s like trying to embrace a struggling fish. The only fruit of all this labour is blue bruises and an off putting odour.

I left my home at ten, and 14 years later I still feel like a foreigner in every place I find myself. My feet are tired. Tired of mud and blisters and mild frostbite. They ache with wondering if they will ever be planted in a place of embrace again.

There are so many questions that decorate the walls of this liminal hallway. I am frantic with the chaos of it all.

So, as I stand here in the chaos, I have decided to write my way through the mayhem. Perhaps to make sense of it all, perhaps to just to tie down the hatches as the wind continues to blow.

Living as a forever foreigner has made me realise that there are so many others living in this chaotic middle too. I write for me, and I write for you.

Question for you today…

When, and where, was the last time you felt truly embraced by a place?

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Letter from Love…

I Love you, my wild one. Do not be dismayed, for the time you have been waiting for is fast approaching. Don’t get caught up by the ‘what ifs’. Let me tell you what is…

Love is. And you are so Loved. The waves are roaring out my Love. The sky is shouting out my goodness. There is no where you can hide from such raucous beauty. It chases you down. It wrestles you to the ground and pins you there with its ardent gaze. You are cherished and embraced right where you are. There is a mercy in the beauty that adorns the sea and sky— let yourself be taken up by it all. You are not alone. You do not grieve alone. You do not walk with blistered muddy feet alone. I am there before and behind you.

Do not be afraid to go to the limits of your longing, for there too I will meet you. Long before you were a seed in the soil, I was planting goodness for you. Nutrients to sustain you. Water to refresh you. Nestle down in my Love. I will secure you. I will fasten you. Do not be afraid, for you never walk alone.

In one week, I leave Ireland and go back to England. One week after that, I embark on a new adventure. I am going back to South Africa. To the blustery sea that knew me first. I am excited, but I am also terrified. I hope to write my way through this process, and I would be honoured if you joined me.

Love,

Keziah x

Does this thought process sound familiar?

No? Well it’s on repeat in my dusty brain, that’s for sure.

I think I have focused way too much on perfection. I am always waiting until I am perfectly “ready”. I delay action, which Brianna Weist, author of The Mountain Is You, would confirm is a sure sign of self sabotage.

Are you self-sabotaging?

Ah, self-sabotage, how familiar I am with her devious ways…

Self sabotage is a limiting habit. Limiting habits are formed to meet an unmet need within us. As a perfectionist, I am far too familiar with self sabotage. Perhaps I have an unmet need for a regulated and controlled environment so a lot of my decision making is fuelled by the desire to make the safest most “right” decision possible.

This is a sure fire way to get absolutely nothing done.

Weist advises that “you need to get clear on what you really want",” and basically act on what matters and leave the rest. She also says that “we step too quickly towards what we think we want, only to find we didn’t think it through and don’t really want it”. A quote from this same book1 has stuck with me for the past few weeks…

Your life is ultimately measured by your outcomes, not your intentions. It is not about what you wanted to do or would have done, but didn’t have the time. It’s not about why you thought you couldn’t; it is only whether or not you did.

What a challenge. Honestly, I feel quite called out and this one quote alone has shifted my perspective significantly. Life is measured by outcomes, not intentions. This is ultimately why it is vital to know what you want, so that you can properly go after it.

On agency

Agency, I have noticed, has become the newest buzzword of the substak community (or is it just me?) The more I read, however, the I realise that agency is what I have needed all along!

Agency, according to the dictionary result on Google, is an “action or intervention producing a particular effect”. Honestly this sounds quite basic. Agency is basic. It is simply cause and effect. The reason I believe agency is so important is that many of us (me) just let life happen to us. We become passive participants in our own lives, rather than remembering that we are the main character in our story. We are the cause that leads to the effect. Don’t get me wrong, we are by no means in control of life, but we definitely have control over our own actions. So… if you (like me) want to remember your role in your own freaking life… Let’s dive into:

Becoming agentic

Apparently, according to my copious reading on the topic, high agency people always assume responsibility and adopt, what the agency experts refer to as “bias for action”.

Bias for action happens when you favour activity over inactivity (even when it’s imperfect). By going through life with a high bias for action, the likelihood is more things will happen. This increases your experience of your unique context and allows you to practice iteration. So by taking more action, you expose yourself to more contextual information, and by repeating this process over and over again, you can make more interesting decisions (or decisions that lead you closer to what you have decided you want).

George Mack offers an interesting take on ways to increase your agency.

1. Pick the option that feels like it will produce the most luck later on

2. Ask specific questions

3. Pick the option that will result in a more interesting story

4. Work less. Focus more.

Henrik Karlson determines that agency is made up of autonomy (figure out what you want) and efficiency (drive to solve the problems you want to solve). So I guess agency really can be distilled into a two step process…

1. Figure out what you want

2. Solve the problems you want to solve

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Figure out what you want

When I sit in the quiet of my room, I can filter some of the noise and arrive at a somewhat still place. In this stillness I have realised that what I really really want is actually a little different to the life the people around me have imagined for me.

I have realised that I crave adventure. All I want is to be outside. To reconnect with my wild, playful, and childlike self. I want to be in wide open spaces. I want to sit with rivers and play in trees. I want a job that makes this kind of living possible, as often as possible.

I also realise that I want to write. I love writing.

I write primarily to find out what I’ve been thinking, and I don’t know until I write it .

— Kevin Kelly

I love that writing helps me process and think, but more than that, it is how I process the world. I want to write more.

I have also realised, in this same quiet, what I don’t want. I don’t want a business that is reliant on social media. In fact, I would like to spend exactly 0 minutes a day on any given social media platform. I don’t want a life full of busy noise, hustle, and time wasting activities. I don’t want to live a life disconnected from my values.

Nature, time with the Creator, quiet, poetry, a slow and soft vocation… These are all things I want.

Now, I challenge you, go into the quiet of your room. Turn of all distractions. Ask yourself this:

What do I want?

If all limitations, obstacles, and loud voices were miraculously void, what would I do with my “one wild and precious life?”2

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Solve the problems you want solved

I think this requires a whole separate post.

No it doesn’t.

Solve the damn problem, Keziah.

I believe that solving the problems you want solved simply requires a lot of iteration. Playing towards your purpose. Trying things on.

The fact is, you will fail. There will be plenty that does not work. There will be some disappointments. Some failed relationships. The occasional loss.

But as you and I both know, this is an essential part of the process. I need to remember this. I get so hooked on what isn’t working. This very day I have been in an anxious puddle over work. I desperately want to create a life for myself where I can work remotely in a way that is both purpose driven and liberating. Today I got caught on all the things I have tried, but to be honest with you, I haven’t tried many of them very hard or diligently. I have iterated through plenty of ideas, for which I am proud, and I think I have found the idea I am ready to stick with. Now I just need to iterate through some solutions to my problem.

Let’s put this into practice shall we? (Let’s use me as an example, but please go away and practice this on your own).

What I want: a job that I can do remotely. A purpose filled vocation that allows me to serve others, whilst also giving me time to be outside and explore the natural world.

The idea: a monthly zoom workshop focused on helping women learn about how to heal their periods naturally (I am a medical herbalist). Some writing on the side.

The problem: I don’t have traffic. I don’t have money for advertising. I don’t want to be on social media anymore.

The solution: start writing regularly on substack. Write 1-3 notes a day. Create some graphics on canva and share them with friends. (This is how far I have gotten with the solution, but hopefully I will come up with some more ideas).

So hopefully by now, you are more clear on what you want and you know that you must take various actions towards what you want (if you want to get what you want, eventually). I am still working on all of this. This will be the journey of my entire 20s I think.

I will leave you with one last question.

Here’s to building agency and taking action before you’re ready.

With love,

Keziah

our lives are filled with unanswered questions. my own life has been beautiful, but it has still been raw and there have moments of pain and bloody loss that i still grapple with today. in fact, these little and large losses shape my days. i think about them often…

questions tear at the corners of my own mind… why did we leave? why did we stay? why am i where i am now? where am i going? where should i go? where should i stay?

will things ever make sense?

the other day, i was listening to a fantastic podcast, hosted by krista tippett. she was interviewing the two translators of rilke’s “letters to a young poet”. it refreshed the text in my mind and reminded me of the beauty of this writer’s words. they felt fresh and vibrant and true. each line precious, given to me as a personal gift. the following lines have not left my side since:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

and yet, rilke (I cry), i am impatient by nature. i don’t love these unsolved questions. they are hard and unyielding. i want answers. i want to live today into the answer. as i write this, i know (not even that deep down) that rilke’s words are the cutting wisdom i need in this season.

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life is poetry

i think life must be like poetry.1 you might not understand what is happening, but you are changing the way you perceive the world through the observation of beauty. to quote this note,

The poem is not an act of communication. Instead, it is an act of prompting. The poet is approaching you as a language model, supplying a series of prompts that you’re supposed to run in your head—and it’s the thing that happens inside you that matters.

ts eliot wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. it is almost as if poetry is not meant to be understood. it is meant to be experienced. it is meant to transform your interior world— and interior transformation most often happens at a subconscious level. james finley explores this idea in his book falling upward. true transformation happens when we are not chasing after our idea of what the transformative outcome might look like. it happens ‘like a thief in the night” (revelation 16:15, matthew 24:43, 1 thessalonians 5:2).2

maybe rilke’s right about “all that is unsolved” in our hearts. maybe the questions are not meant to be understood. maybe the command to “live the questions now” is a coded gift.

i don’t fully understand what it means to live a question. i guess to live an answer would be like living an outcome, or completion, or wholeness. right now, things are not complete or whole. we live in a confusing, broken world where things inherently do not make sense. to live the question then, perhaps, means to live on the other side of what we hope for.

romans 8:25 in the message reads:

All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

living everything

the line that says “the point is to live everything” reminds me of rilke’s poem “go to the limits of your longing” where he says:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

(go to the limits of your longing, rilke)

“live everything” and “let everything happen to you”. for if we are “enlarged in the waiting,” we are are expanded and transformed by what we do not see and cannot understand.

Rilke uses such a gentleness with this young poet. “be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart” he coaches. “do not seek the answers” he affirms. he explains that if you found the answers now, you “would not be able to live them”. oh what a mystery.

surrendering everything

what i do know and understand, is that to live is to be transformed, and transformation is so much more likely to happen when we aren’t looking. when we are surrendered to the process.

if you look at the trees along blustery coastlines, you’ll see that they grow bent in the direction of direct winds. if they remained upright, like those in a sheltered valley, they would most likely break. they have learnt that to survive and thrive, they must adapt to the environment they find themselves in.

we must evaluate which way the wind is blowing and river flowing, and decide if we will remain upright or bend. if we hold onto our perceived control, remaining stiff, upright, and unbending, we will certainly break. truly, the harder we grip onto our perceived control, the less free we become. freedom comes from releasing our grip on life and surrendering to its flow. perhaps answers come this way too so that we “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer”.

through the process of writing this, i have decided that we have become muddled. the answer is not our final destination. we think we are living towards this “distant day”, but really the command is to “live everything now”. the beauty. the terror. to surrender to what is, right now. not to give up hoping for a someday, but rather to surrender to the astonishment of this day.

the following poem, by mary oliver, says more than i ever could and brings us to a sweet, if a little unfinished, close. if you dwell on any of the words on this page, dwell on these:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

(Mysteries, Yes, by Mary Oliver).

As a people, our roots once traveled deep. They grew ever downwards, forming networks that held the surrounding soil firm. Communities, like woodlands, sprung up in hard places, drawing life and beauty up out of the earth. Here, in the safety of kin, our sense of belonging was the thread that tethered us. Rather than binding or constricting, this thread helped us remember our place and people of origin. Like Theseus in the Labyrinth, it guided us through our stories of life, loss, and triumph, back to our “home”.

Migration and displacement.

As the story of humanity progressed, migration and displacement became common place. We have become a people dispersed and spread thin over the surface of the earth. Where there were once villages, little knots of belonging, there are now sprawling metropolises of people who have forgotten.

We have forgotten our origin stories. We have forgotten how to build new places of belonging.

Of course, migration is not a new concept, nor is displacement. It seems to me, however, that the way we move and grow and deepen into our stories have entirely changed.

Migration and displacement, on a physical level, have changed the way community is built and belonging tended. Migration and displacement on a spiritual level, have changed our hearts and minds irrevocably.

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Spiritual refugees.

If someone has to flee their country, due to persecution or war, they are known today as a refugee. This title holds great weight and grief. The consequences of this type of migration are huge. Loss of place. Loss of people. Loss of connection. Loss of sense of belonging. So much weight, so much loss, so much grief.

I would argue that a similar (yet starkly different) kind of loss is happening on a spiritual level across the world. As a people, we are migrating in new ways, but the consequences of detaching and uprooting from our origin stories remain the same.

With the birth of the internet, came the loss of our depth of presence and connection with one another. We, once again, find ourselves spread thin across the earth. Except, this time, we are spread thin and scattered on a spiritual level. Human connection has gone virtual. Our ways of expressing and seeking intimacy have become distant calls through depersonalised echo chambers.

We have “evolved” from gathering in tightly knit groups, passing down stories and leaning on our elders; to gathering in zoom rooms, swiping up on reels, and relying on chatgpt.

Our way of being in the world has altered, forever.

This twist in the human narrative has created a new kind of spiritual refugee. We have become detached, not only from one another, but from nature, our bodies, our spirits, and our Creator. By relying on wavelengths to carry our presence of connection, we have loosened our grip on what is real.

So, what is real? What does it mean to belong? To be present? Why is it necessary to tend to our roots and our sense of belonging?

To that, I would answer that everything hinges on what we believe to be true about our identity. If we view ourselves as isolated beings detached from nature, from each other, and from our very bodies, we are in grievous peril. The truth of our being human is defined by interpersonal, interdependent connection.

Our sense of belonging springs up out of what is true about our relationships. If we are detached from nature, community, and ourselves, our sense of belonging will crumble. When we tend to our relationships, we tend to our belonging.

Do not misunderstand me. Our sense of belonging is not dependent on our effort to carve out a place for ourselves in this world. Rather, our sense of belonging flourishes when our belief about the world, and our place in it, centres on the following…

The world hinges on a relational axis. Everything true about our identity revolves around relationship. We are closest to truth when we choose to shape our belief system about the world and human identity around this axis.

That brings us back to the question, what is truth? The truth of our very being is that we are loved through and through and that are lives are embedded in a deeper, wider, longer story. We are not individual beings on linear parallel paths. We live in a beautiful, messy, overlapping story. One of connection and love and beauty.

On belonging in the internet era.

Belonging is a somewhat abstract phenomenon. I know it well, mainly from the distinct feeling that I lack it.

I grew up with my legs straddled across two continents. Born in one place, living in another. As time wears on, these two landmarks in my spiritual story seem to float further away from one another. My legs burn with the effort of holding on.

When I was about 15, I began living in yet another place. Social media became a tertiary landmass that I clung to with both arms. It really seemed like a place of goodness. It fed me when I was hungry. It presented knowledge like the tree of life. It was the fruit that sweetened stark days and filled me when I felt empty. It was a place of distraction, of comfort, of ease. All good things, surely?

Since moving to this new place, I have grown accustomed to new ways of being in the world. I move distracted, untethered, and unmoored from anything real. My mind jumps skittishly away from the uncomfortable.

If belonging is rooted, I have become increasingly uprooted.

Human uprooting has expanded from just physical uprooting. The internet was once just a tool. It is now a campsite for a displaced people. Worse, social media is a grenade, thrown from our own hand, into our own home.

I am using strong language. There is always nuance. After all, what a beautiful thing it is to be able to connect with people all over the world from the comfort of our couches. The point remains the same though. The internet has resulted in chronically shallow relational connection. If our sense of identity stems from belonging, which hinges on the health of our relationships, we are at risk of forgetting our very selves.

A guide to finding belonging in times of displacement.

1. Read this and this (on ditching your phone for more real things).

2. Find new places to dwell:

   1. Go outside at least as many times as you check instagram. (Don’t have the time? Maybe try shifting the ratio).

   2. Create times of real physical connection (join a group activity, sport, dinner club, church, or bookclub).

   3. Find new homes in sweeter places (books, movies, art, music, podcast, audiobooks etc.).

3. Nature has something to say. Learn from the trees and the way they gather together, relying on delicate mycelium networks to connect and share information. Find your people. Find your home.

4. You are a physical being with a physical body. Your connection to land matters JUST AS MUCH AS your connection to PEOPLE. (I wholeheartedly disagree with the people who say that “people matter more than place”. It is simply not true. There is too much caught up in the threads of belonging to believe we are exclusively spiritual beings with no sense of attachment to the environment we live in).

5. Be where your feet are. In other words, be present to the place in which you find yourself today. It might not be the place you would like to find yourself in, but it is the place you are. Be here. Embrace it. Cling to what is real and tangible. Even in the brokenness, there is goodness and grace.

Personally, I find number five the hardest. I am a future oriented person (perhaps that is my fourth home). Unfortunately, the future is no more real than AI and the only real thing we have, is the present. I am still learning to be where my feet are. In fact, I think this must be a lifetime work. A work of digging up, and burrowing down. A work of pruning and training. A work of allowing buried seeds to sprout forth and blossom. A work, ultimately, of trust.

On belonging.

Having a sturdy sense of belonging is vital for creating healthy thriving human life. For “even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young” (Psalm 84:3).

James Finley, a beloved mystic and voice of wisdom, says that “the goal in the sacred story is always to come back home”.

What does it mean to “come back home”? Here Finley is talking of “the sacred story” which is a story deeper than our physical reality. Of course, the physical is an essential part of the sacred, but what is the physical without the spirit to perceive it? Many of us are seeking physical homecomings (country, family, marriage, etc.). All of us are longing for spiritual homecoming.

I believe, wholeheartedly, that this homecoming is a long winding journey that begins, and ends, with relationship.

Share Tending Roots

I have spent my day moving from my bed to the sofa, outside to my car, to the grocery store, and back to bed again.

My brain feels fuzzy, like the fig leaf outlined with blue that waved over my head as I napped earlier today. I am tired in the way where it feels hard to think. Words are spilling from my tapping fingers— I don’t know if they make sense. I have already asked ChatGPT to correct grammar on the sentence above, deciding I preferred my confused grammar instead.

As a medical herbalist, I know many (many) ways to live a good and healthy life. I can tell you, the best ways to take care o your teeth, how to increase water absorption on a cellular level, how to support a UTI, how to reduce painful periods… Having said all that, the most valuable thing I can tell you is what not to do.

A lesson on what not to do.

1. Do not approach rest as a holiday or night time activity.

2. Do not ignore your body’s need for rest.

3. Do not pretend to rest by staying distracted.

4. Do not rest because it will help you get more done.

5. Do not leave rest as a last resort activity to stave off burnout.

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Two days later…

I have just got home from a full day of work. I am exhausted. I am lying horizontal in bed, yet again. But the moral of the story is: do less. Listen to your body’s need for rest. So I am going to sign off for now…

But first,

If you’re also learning how to rest, listen, and live in rhythm with your cycle, I’ve created a private space called Living Cyclically. It’s where I share herbal guidance, weekly prompts, and live Q&As for women wanting to trust their bodies again.

You can read more and join here:

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Autumn: the beginning of a slow decline into winter and the obituary to an almost forgotten, yet forever longed for, summer—

Most beloved Season (June-August)

Summer was the season of sweetness and passed away on August the 31st after a brief yet epic seance. She followed in Spring’s footsteps, yet passed after a regrettably brief season, cut short by Autumn’s cold and impatient command.

Dispatches

The Slow Down Prescription

September is, in this hemisphere, the beginning of autumn. As back-to-school busyness runs rampant, things are slowing down in nature.

This subtle slowing down— of leaf growth and quickly approaching hibernation period— is an invitation in itself.

An invitation to be radically countercultural.

Slow down.

Social media, news articles, and YouTube videos will all plead with you saying, “this is the time to knuckle down, to get serious”. They shove hustle at you as if resisting going full “monk mode” will result in a life of poverty and lack.

Nature gently nudges us in another direction. Look to the trees. Is their identity based around how tall they grow or how large their leaves span? Or the birds. Is their identity formed around the heights they reach or the prey they catch? Or the wild and beautiful grasses. Do they identify themselves by how quickly water rushes through their xylem or how efficiently they metabolise nitrogen?

If identity’s value positively correlated with output and productivity, this principle would be seen in nature. Darwin’s law may offer the counter point of “the bigger the better”, and yet, everything created has adapted and evolved to rest.

Why do trees lose their leaves?

Deciduous trees lose their leaves to spend less energy through winter, protect themselves against harsh conditions, and conserve moisture. Instead of focusing its energy in leaf and fruit growth, a deciduous tree will lose its leaves so it has more energy to direct to self-preservation and root growth.

And you?

As autumn approaches, what would it look like for you to reject the cultural demand to retain or increase output, instead focusing on a natural slowing down? Reassigning energy from external output to activities that enhance self-preservation and figurative root growth.

That’s radical.

This is the etymology of the word “radical” according to Merriam Webster’s dictionary definition:

“Radical comes from a Latin word meaning "root," and in its earliest uses it referred to roots of various kinds, first literal and then figurative. Because roots are the deepest part of a plant, radical came to describe things understood as fundamental or essential. In phrases like "radical reform" and "radical change," radical implies a shift in the most fundamental or essential part of something; such uses led to the word radical taking on meanings relating to extreme views, policies, etc.”

A radical return to nature’s cycles of rest is a return to the fundamental, the essential. Rest is fundamental to the human body and mind. This is your slow down prescription. Go rest.

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Autumn Musings

Poetry Corner

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

by Mary Oliver

This poem speaks through deep time, echoing the mysteries of this world. In this poem Oliver seems to be gently probing the receiver of this poem to let go of their longing to “have the answers”, instead resting in the mystery of life with humility. What a challenge. To look to these profound mysteries— even within the simplicity of grass “in the mouths of lambs”.

We live in the constant tension of “delight” and “scars of damage”. How do we hold both and somehow live in astonishment and humility? Perhaps by seeking company with those who allow themselves to be surprised by beauty and life and mystery all at once.

Perhaps the company we seek is the very grass, lambs, rivers, stones, and poems themselves.

This autumn, may we rest in “the comfort of a poem”.

This Month’s Notices

Lifestyle Ledger

Movement: Wild Walking

Here is your September challenge. As much as you can… walk. Walk to the shop. Walk to work. Walk to the library. Walk to the gym.

Walk on the weekends. Walk to relax. Walk when you feel irritable. Walk when the world feels dark. Walk for the joy of it.

Walk to observe. Walk to watch. Walk to pay attention. Walk to notice. Walk to keep present.

Walk as a counter cultural, and radical, act of rest. Walk because the world moves slower that way. Walk because your feet get tired and you need to sit down. Walk because it’s raining and you will get wet. Walk because you might be late this way, but at least you will be present for the turning of the leaves and the returning of the dark evenings. All senses switched on to the spiralling chimney smoke and dying bird song and conker littered tarmac.

Walk to stay wild. To stay present.

Rituals: September Reset

A september ritual.

Prepare your house for the coming autumn. Switch out your summer duvet for a winter one. Add a blanket to both your bed and sofa. Gather some autumn memorabilia from outside:

Conkers, chestnuts, drying grasses, winged seeds (samara), Hawthorne.

Fill your house with said memorabilia!

Romanticise the darkening evenings. Start eating meals in candle light. Commit to a book or TV show that is exclusively for the evenings. Take baths, embrace skincare, go to bed early.

Switch out your fresher summer recipes for warmer autumnal ones. Embrace spices and warm flavours. Collect apple windfalls and blackberries. Fill your kitchen with warmth and life.

Try the recipe below to kick off your autumnal kitchen.

Kitchen: Autumn Equinox Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 chopped onion

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• 1 tsp chilli powder

• 1 tsp paprika

• 1/2 tsp mixed green herbs

• 1 peeled and chopped butternut

• 1 cup yellow lentils

• 1 stock cube + water

• Salt + pepper

Method:

Combine your chopped onion and spices in a saucepan with a drizzle of olive oil. Stir until browned.

Add your chopped butternut and stir for 3 minutes.

Pour in the lentils and stock (with enough water to cover both the butternut and lentils). Season with salt and pepper and cook on a low to medium heat until the butternut is completely soft.

Blend until smooth. Serve with sourdough bread and roasted pumpkin seeds. Enjoy!

This world is not baby proofed for the soft and gentle ones— crawling around on their hands and knees. Mine are blushing blue. I ice them; when what they’re really crying for is a heat and tenderness.

To live softly, in a hard world, is to create space.

To live spaciously is to leave the busy hardened tarmac and wander towards greener places washed in heather.

I choose to take my shoes off and bear witness to the earth that bears me on Her hips. I am not a burden.

I choose to breathe. Each exhale a curling rebellion against the cold night. Each inhale reminds me who is really breathing me into life.

To life softly, in a hard world, is to notice.

To notice the wounds, and the wander. It is to create medicine out of stories and gaze at the passing beauty of every scene. Each frame, a snapshot of ordinary goodness.

Water.

Food.

Shelter.

Laughter.

To live softly, in a hard world, is to say no.

To say no to the rush. To the chaos. To the disorder. To my propensity to harden.

To live softly in a hard world, is to be vulnerable.

It is to live without the safety of a shell.

Instead I will find shelter under His eaves. Under the shadow of feathers and leaves. I will stay soft and naked in a garden we created.

For vulnerability is the refusal to harden. It is the insistent surrender. The activist’s plea.

And yet, my heart ponders on the folly of staying so exposed to the elemental whipping of the world. Surely I will bleed or drown or faint or fall?

And yet.

A fennel seed is pressed against the marble of the mortar. As the pestle pounds, a redolent perfume pours forth.

Molten heat and the horror of the earth’s core pulls and blows. Time passes in its winding sort of way. A man kneels on a beach— a diamond gleams its glittering smile.

The wind scourges its curses against rock face. Mountains, peaks and summits, are birthed in its breath.

So, I wonder, what will the world make of my softened spirit and animal body? I pray that this hard place makes me into perfume and precious stone and mountain peak. I pray that out of this hardness, I will be made softer. I pray that my every edge would be blunted and my shell would crack, falling away, as I grow into the bigness of who I am. I pray that I would create medicine and gardens and homes in the rubble and chaos and that this verdant goodness would become a deluge.

So. How to live softly in a hardened world? It is to say yes to the formation of surrender.