Thank you, God. And Nature. For this most amazing day. For skies, couple-colored as a brindled cow.

And so it begins: Another day, typing. Thank you. I have as long as I need to write.

Yesterday, as I began letting more of what was coming out into my writing, I wrote this line: I am a piece of shit.

This led to a whirlwind of beholding, first this belief. She cowered before an aspect of me that scared her, so then I beheld that too: My perfectionism. Always wanting to be perfect so I can be above and beyond everyone else: untouchable, invulnerable, better than everyone. And underneath that pretense, at the roots of it, lay my entire feeling of unworthiness. Not worthy.

So I hung out there with that for a while. I can’t remember whether she shifted and how much, only that I was so exhausted afterwards I curled under a blanket on the couch and slept another hour and ½ despite the caffeine I’d had. It felt like I was sick and just needed to care for myself. I held my childhood stuffed animal snoopy, who looks not that much like snoopy, and I dosed.

Two penguin parents curve their black heads towards their chick on the front of the World Wild Life Fund’s 2019 calendar. They are more beautiful than anything I could dream up. Instead of feeling hopeless, I turn my focus back over and over again into this present moment from within my own life. It’s the only place I can make a difference, or help. And it’s not only by taking actions in the outside world: It’s also by taking action here, in the inside.

I’m trying to bring these two together. They arrive. They eye each other from different rooms in my childhood home, separated only by details & dimensions. We are one. But part of me always runs away from the connection. She hides.

You’d have thought I’d made no progress at all the way she’s vanished just as I would have introduced her to you. But there used to be underground tunnels she hid in that stretched for miles. The fact we inhabit the same dwelling, that we could almost touch, that we made the same page for a while, marks enormous growth. What’s sad and funny is that the result seems similar. And yet, when I inhale, she’s there. I cannot force her into the world. Force is always a bad idea.

But in my beingness, my breath, my simply staying present, she sighs and joins me. She reads over my shoulder. The attention makes her nervous, though. She’d like for me to stop writing about her now.

I may have to stop writing soon, because I’m getting sleepy. Will this be my pattern, then? To write and then crash under my blankets, holding my stuffed animals? This sounds exactly like me, and if my teeth were smaller and I younger I’d also suck my thumb. And what of it? Great things are managed sometimes while holding our own hands. Yes, I will stay a minute, my dear. Yes, I will tuck you in.