Dear everything: relationality

my cross-country move, what I touch touches you, & an airplane story

Earlier this month, flying over Texas, hungry, after packing most everything I own and sending it along the roadways beneath my flight, I was thinking about nourishment. I’ve been thinking lately about interconnectedness as a form of nourishment. Across the aisle from my seat, a sleeping woman’s head bobs once, then twice, before I reach across the slender plane’s path between our seats and curve her headrest toward her head to protect her while she sleeps. It worked.

I’m in the middle of a thought project about relationality. Being connected to my nearest and dearest, to you, to everyone, everywhere. This kind of interconnectedness gets me thinking about the plants and animals, too, and I can’t help but wonder if my microcosms really are rippling out to everyone else’s. If so, what I touch around me, touches you also. Isn’t that a wild idea?

I wrapped up Dear Town earlier this summer, and I’m starting to receive letters (both in the mail and via email) back! Wow! I really believe this is the kind of interconnectedness we need right now. I want every town to experience this.

Tending the part of the garden I can reach¹ in each moment as it unfolds allows me to notice where my hands can be of service, where my heart can open, my mind can quiet, and my intuition can flower. When flying on planes or riding on trains, I’m very sensitive to the fragrances, the food, and the countless people. And when this woman’s dark hair fell as her head bounced down and back up, the relationality was second-nature; my hands knew how to tend the moment before me.

A few years ago, my teacher passed away, peacefully but surprisingly, as he was the epitome of vitality, even into his old age. The day before, I asked for a last-minute meeting with him, unknowing of his very liminal space. In this close-to-the-heavens moment, he reveals to me that the calling is heating up in the cauldron. One of the more formative teachers in my life, I am listening with utmost attention. He says there will be a period of time I cross the river alone before I realize my people have been there all along, on both banks of the flowing water. He says go forward.

A few months ago, I knew it was time to move back home, to return to the land where I was born and raised: the Texas Hill Country. The calling had finally become louder than I could ignore. If I tune in to total quiet, I know the beckon really began the moment I left Texas, but I had to leave, just as I had to return. I’m home now. In a small town near where I grew up. The land is as I’d recalled, the people are, and there’s something in me waking, stirring, more alive now than before. I love showing my children places from my childhood. Swimming in swimming holes. Being outside and comfortable in my body. I’m warm, after 17 (!!) years of being cold, I’m warm again. It hasn’t been without the darkest depths and underworld initiations (still in it, a story for another time), but I trust the calling and feel divinely supported.

Our new living room, along with some of my books.

I am still here. Integrating that which is much. Touching what I touch. Loving you from where I am. Asking what you are touching now, what garden do your hands tend?

I’m on the other side of a letter.

Yours,
Lindsey

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1. a Buddhist story