Listening to the quiet stirring that says something new is coming
Lately, I’ve noticed how much the lunar cycles affect me. An inner agitation isn’t necessarily negative, but it wakes me up and says something is brewing; pay attention.
This unsettled feeling meets another convergence of energy, almost rip-tide-y; a creative energy is tagging it and wanting it to take shape.
Elizabeth Gilbert says this about it in her book Big Magic. She describes creativity as a “strange, stubborn, and unrelenting force” that lives in all of us, and as something not entirely human in its origins. She thinks of ideas as living things: disembodied life forms with no form, but with will and consciousness, spending eternity circling the earth looking for collaborators. If you don’t act on an idea, it moves on and finds someone who will.
When I read this, I felt so validated. Someone knows how this feels, not only in my mind and spirit but particularly in my body. The agitation, the dreams that wake me at night, the new vocabulary I have to learn to describe what I want to create, and ultimately bringing it to life.
So at the beginning of the week I contacted my creative team, Amy and Sarah, to see if they could make sense of notes I had poured into Claude to help me organize meeting notes, and quickly Sarah shot back a text that said, “I feel like this is the clearest direction we’ve had yet! Love this, Sarah, thank you!”
Ok now I know we are onto something.
Because this is the thing with my creative energy; sometimes it drops in but doesn’t fully form, almost like it is teasing me into action, but the ball keeps dropping, and I understand it was never meant to take shape; it was just testing the soil to see if the soil I was offering was the best choice for this creative energy to take shape.
This time, the idea didn’t leave. It stayed and began to grow.
It circled for months, through more than one full moon. It showed up on my morning walks, in the shower, in the car with the radio off. It showed up at three in the morning, asking questions I didn’t yet have answers to. It showed up in my journal as half-sentences, arrows, and words I’d underline twice without knowing why. I could feel it moving in me before I could see it, the way you sense a life before it has a face. And slowly, the way the light changes in November before you notice it has, I realized it had settled in. It had decided I was the ground.
What wants to be born has a name now (I think). Both Hands Open.
I keep picturing those words as a gesture. Palms turned up, nothing gripped, nothing pushed away. One hand receiving what is arriving and the other releasing what is ready to go. It is the moon’s own rhythm, filling and emptying, over and over, never clinging to either. It is the posture I have been practicing for years without knowing what to call it, in Brave Rest, in grief, in the joy of watching my children make their own lives, in the long quiet afternoons when I finally let myself stop. It is how I want to meet everything that comes next, and I mean everything. The new adventures and the slower days. The people who arrive and the ones we will eventually have to let go. Even the last chapter, which most of us are taught never to look at directly, and which I have come to believe is its own kind of birth.
Why does this matter so much to me? Because nothing new can be born into a closed fist. I have watched what happens when we hold on too tightly. I have felt it in my own body, the tight jaw, the shallow breath, the way we brace against change as if bracing could stop it. So many of us spent the first half of our lives gripping. Gripping the schedule, the children, the career, the image of who we were supposed to be. We were very good at it. We were rewarded for it. Then one day the grip starts to ache, and we realize the things we held so tightly were never ours to keep.
This season of life asks something different of us. Our bodies are changing. Our parents are aging or already gone. Our children are building lives that don’t need us in the same way. Friends are getting diagnoses. The calendar feels shorter than it used to. And no one really hands us a map for this part. We are expected to keep going as if nothing has shifted, when everything has.
I don’t believe the answer is to hold on harder. I also don’t believe it is to give up. I think there is a third way, a softer and braver way, and it lives in the open hand. When we stop clutching, we make room. Rest becomes possible. Grief moves through instead of getting stuck. Joy has somewhere to land. We can look at the hardest questions- how do I want to live these years, what do I want to leave behind, how do I want to say goodbye when it is time- and find that they are not as frightening as we were told. In fact, they can be the doorway to the most honest, tender, alive years of our lives.
That is what I want for you. That is what I want for me. Not a life without loss, because there is no such thing, but a life where loss and love can sit side by side in the same open palms, and we are strong enough and soft enough to hold them both.
So something is being built, and I am clearing the space for it. Something that gathers all the pieces I have been carrying in separate baskets, the practices, the letters I write to you each week, the journeys to Bali and beyond, and weaves them into one place to rest. There is a new home coming, and a new way for us to be together inside it. There is a collaboration I am quietly thrilled about that I can’t name just yet. And there is a word I didn’t even have in my vocabulary a year ago that has become the heartbeat of all of it.
I am going to let this unfold slowly, the way the moon does. A sliver at a time. Anything worth birthing needs its season in the dark before it is ready to be seen, and I am learning to trust that waiting is part of the work.
But I wanted you to know it’s coming. And I wanted to ask you something, too. What has been circling you lately? What keeps showing up in your dreams, on your walks, in the margins of your notebook? Next time the moon wakes you in the night, maybe don’t roll over right away. Lie still for a moment and listen. Something may be asking for room in you, too.
I hope you will make space for it. I hope we both keep our hands open.
Forever love, as always,
Sarah
