Audio version:
Connection is my lifeblood. Without it, there is an unbearable emptiness, one I have learned to recognize the way you recognize weather coming in off the water before you can see it. Something shifts. The air changes. And I know.
I have been sitting with this lately, really drilling down on it. Why do I write? Why do I teach, draw, step onto my meditation mat each morning? What is the part of me that can override the voice that says not today, the one that rises up when my body feels heavy, my heart feels tender, or my mind has gone somewhere dim and cottony? What overrides that? What says: show up anyway?
The answer, every time, is connection.
Rituals are the framework that holds my life. Not rules. Not routines for the sake of discipline. Rituals, those small, faithful acts that charge the day with meaning before the world has a chance to drain it. They don’t ask for perfect conditions. They don’t wait for me to feel ready or rested or particularly inspired. They say: bring what you have. We’ve got you.
This is the thing about a ritual: it exists outside the noise of what’s hard. It predates the hard thing. It will outlast it, too. So when I kneel into it, when I breathe, when I walk, when I sit with my cards in the morning quiet, I am not trying to fix anything. I am simply remembering what I’m made of.
Connection shows up in many forms. It arrives as breath moving through my body, slow and full, and equally as the ache in my chest when something asks for grace. It comes through the wind on the beach, sun on my face, the moon pulling at the tides, birdsong I’ve heard a thousand times that still manages to stop me. Rain on the windows. Waves that don’t care at all about my schedule.
In friendship, it’s laughter that catches you off guard, dancing in kitchens, the quiet power of someone remembering your birthday when you’d almost forgotten it yourself. In my most intimate relationships, the ones where I’ve allowed someone all the way in, it’s listening to the fears that arise in the dark, the soft touch that says I see you without saying a word, the check-ins, and the just-becauses. The small gestures that mean: you are not alone in this.
This past week, as David and I were preparing to travel together, I noticed something. We do this every time we leave; we get the house in order. We drift into our separate orbits: lists, logistics, the ten thousand small responsibilities that pile up before departure. We get efficient. Practical. And somewhere in that efficiency, we quietly lose each other.
I have felt this before. That low-grade static, that something’s off feeling, the kind that makes me anxious in a way I can’t quite name. It feels counterintuitive; we are preparing to go somewhere magical together, and yet I am unsettled. The disconnection throws my whole system into a quiet alarm.
But this time, I caught it.
I was lying in bed this morning, the day before we left, and I breathed into it, into the sadness I felt at the edge of something I should have been excited about. I asked myself: Why are you sad right now? And gently, something answered. We had been preparing for the trip externally. Beautifully, thoroughly, practically. But we had forgotten to prepare for it internally. We had forgotten each other.
That small moment of awareness, that pause before sleep, where I let myself actually feel what was there, was itself an act of connection. Connection to myself. And from that place, a connection back to David was possible again.
We didn’t need a grand gesture. We needed to remember. A look, a hand reached across, a moment of actual presence before the travel and the adventure and the wonder of it all pulled us forward.
This is what rituals make possible. They slow us down enough to notice what’s actually happening. They create a pause long enough to ask: ” Where am I? Where are we? They remind us that before any of the doing, there is the being, together, grounded, held.
If you have felt it too, that hollow feeling when the thread of connection goes slack, when the days blur into tasks and obligations and the people you love most somehow drift to the periphery, I want you to know that the thread is still there. It hasn’t snapped. You have just momentarily lost the feel of it.
And the way back is simpler than you think. A breath. A question asked with real curiosity. A ritual returned to, even imperfectly. A hand reached across.
We don’t have to earn our way back to connection. We just have to remember it.
With love from my corner by the sea,
Sarah
