Crunching pinecones and supporting yourself doing what you love

I don't just want to know what love is; I want to experience it flowing through my body

Me, after buying these sunglasses at Nordstrom Rack after trying on a bunch of pairs for fun on a short trip to the US…this was a playful moment for me

I am always talking to God. Which is funny as I tell people I am not religious and recently, a few years ago, felt I had no idea how to pray.

This has not stopped me though.

God and I have a thing.

Often I am grumpy, uncomfortable, or desiring that a quest of learning is facilitated more quickly.

Sometimes, God has a different timeline than me.

I am one of his more tantrum-oriented little butterfly angels.

I think God is ok with that.

Because no matter what I do, I am often reoriented to what really matters and reminded, again and again, that things are happening for me in life, and not to me.

And I also manage to have a lot of fun and adventures, despite my constant state of questing after things.

I was just reminded of this by Aven, a friend and now fellow-writer here on Substack. Aven and I communicate frequently through texts. Aven especially likes voice texting.

I woke up half asleep this morning wondering about my book. It is an unpublished thing. Recently, I hired a new mentor to help me get my work out into the world and he has been mentoring me beautifully.

We quickly took a turn away from crafting offerings, into dealing with energetic issues I had around putting myself out into the world. This has felt like a very helpful thing.

I feel energetic sludge clearing out of my field and more flow and clarity happening.

I learned how to do this in the past for others when I trained with Beverly, a Chi Gong Grand Master. And she did some of it in private sessions with me.

These current sessions with my mentor are shifting how I perceive things. For example, my mentor reminded me that a lot of things I deal with are simply energies in the world that actually have nothing to do with me. They aren’t personal. This world has patriarchal energy in it that is in the process of evolving. If I notice some less than pleasant aspects of that, it is not because something is wrong with me or I am “attracting badly.”

(Have you ever wondered about the Law of Attraction and if you were “attracting badly” when things just don’t seem to be showing up as you planned?)

I always have enjoyed hearing how well I am doing if the encouragement comes from people I admire who are authentic. It is kind of like when someone claps when you go down the slide as a child in a tumultuous bundle of frazzled fun and joy. The adults in your life clap and in that moment, you feel absolutely complete.

Which brings me to the pinecones.

I left Aven a voice text this morning about my garbled dreams where I think I was attempting to talk to her. I told her I thought she could help me with my book-thing.

You see, I spent a great deal of time writing a book. It is my own version of Eat, Pray, Love and has to do with jumping off metaphorical cliffs into the unknown. I worked and worked on the book. In Costa Rica, I rewrote it.

We met in a coffee shop in Uvita and started chatting. I mentioned my book and I told her what was wrong with it. I told her about the traumatic parts I had just written out of it. I told her I took those parts out because whenever I started to tell people my cliff jumping story to give them hope in their own life, they would start to look sad instead of inspired.

Aven, with her short cropped hair and her young-ancient eyes asked me what troubled people so much.

So I jumped off another cliff and told her what happened when I left my marriage. I told her the parts I had written out of my story, both to protect people who were doing their best and didn’t know any better, and to make my story’s message more inspiring and less of a shock to their system.

Aven wanted to hear the parts I took out.

I knew what would happen.

I figured she would look at me with horror, and then maybe some revulsion that wasn’t directed at me, and then wonder if I had cut off all contact with my family? That is what usually happened.

I told her anyway. I don’t know why. I was tired of the reaction I expected. I wasn’t interested in being a victim. I had written my book to empower people. I rewrote it to be kind.

It only took a few minutes to summarize the events of my divorce. Why my family and I stopped speaking. My attorney who encouraged me and was on the cover of attorney magazine during the time she represented me. How she said it was the worst (meaning most contentious and difficult) divorce she had handled.

I told Aven about the family trauma that had emerged, and the painful things that had been said and left unsaid.

How I had both left the metaphorical nest I had inhabited for years and also felt pushed out and spat on.

But that sounds like a victim thing and the spitting happened unconsciously. I really believe that now.

I looked at Aven, across the wooden table in the coffee shop as I summarized it all into a couple of short paragraphs and waited for the cringing.

Aven looked back at me and started to cry.

She asked me why I wrote the things I told her out of my story.

I told her why.

I told her I didn’t want to hurt people in my family and that I also wanted to encourage people.

For me, the journey had empowered me. It wasn’t easy, but it was an adventure any hobbit would be proud to say they completed. And I, I was there with her in Costa Rica. I was free.

Aven looked at me and said something about my book that honored it as a creation with its own energy.

Then the next day she told me how my story had affected her and she had remembered some things from her past, and that the energy of those past events was releasing.

She was grateful to me.

Since then, my book has been sitting and Aven and I have become friends.

It has been years now since I finished the last version of it and I am different. I know when and if I dive into publishing it, I will re-write it again. And it will be good to do so. Necessary even. I am different and it will be different, accordingly.

But I only want to write my book one more time, again. When I dive in this time, I want to publish it. It honors the book and it also honors the creative part of me that is ready to move on after this, and birth more offerings.

I have other books in me. It feels like the time has come to do something. I think that is part of why I hired Alex to mentor me on starting a business and why this morning, in the misty somnolent energy of being both here and still in my dreams, I left Aven a voice text. I suggested to her again, that perhaps she could help me?

I need a sounding board for my book and some coaching. I don’t need a developmental editor or a list of requirements of what a best-selling book needs to be. I have talked to people who do that.

I am determined to do things differently.

I want to enjoy creating this thing and I want to put it out as an offering.

Aven sent me her voice-text response. She is currently hiking the Arizona Trail. I had told her I enjoyed the sound of her crunching footsteps in her audio clips here on Substack.

In her voice text to me, Aven mentioned that she wanted me to hear the pinecones on the trail she was enjoying crunching with her feet.

“Crunch.”

Aven talking.

“Crunch.”

Aven talking more about pinecones and how fun they were to step on.

“Crunch, crunch, crunchy.”

And I was reminded of my morning yesterday, here on the beach. Despite feeling that things are not quite right (see my Princess and the Pea post from last week), I continue to have two main routines in my week. One is writing to you and the other is walking on the beach and finding a place to sit and talk to God. Sometimes, I am not formally talking. I just watch things. Things like the movements of the waves, that surprise me by coming in and flowing out from the beach concurrently and intersecting at strange angles and in interesting patterns. I notice the early morning light sparkling on the water, and how giant, sporadic waves crash against the black, lava cliff and curve backwards on themselves in white, foamy joy, or frustration. Only the waves know.

I watch the light shine through the smooth crest of a newly breaking wave in translucent, fluorescent shades of green.

I watch tiny crabs scurry in and out of cracks in the rock. Or little stripped fish, smaller than my finger tip, swim in warm pools. I wonder how easily they will get back to the sea?

I watch the clouds turn purplish-pink. Or sometimes I watch the mist that turns the sultry air into monochrome beauty, devoid of color and soothing in a different way.

Yesterday, I strolled to the end of the beach and sat for a time. Then I found a sense of delight in my soul. I don’t know why or where it came from and I was just unexpectedly energetic and happy. There were not many people around so I allowed myself to be free. I did things that are not adult-like that I never stopped enjoying. I skipped. I played in the water and kicked it into the sky. I watched the drops tinkle through the air and scatter in front of me like gold glitter.

I don’t like running. Not usually. Usually it hurts my knee. But I do like skipping, so I skipped along, next to the sea. And then with reckless abandon, I was running. My knee didn’t hurt. I was free. Ecstasy.

There is a stretch of rock-boulders that separate my beach from the adjacent one. As long as the tide is low enough, I find my way across this boulder sea to enjoy a stroll along both beaches. It is fun. It reminds me of my time in gymnastics when I was younger, and balancing on a balance beam. And it reminds me of my yoga practice, where I feel my body and the joy of moving dynamically.

I have told myself my rock-walking is good for my brain as I get older.

I have told myself it is good exercise and will help my balance.

I have told myself many reasons it is good for me.

But that is not why I do it.

Not really.

I walk across those rocks because it is just plain fun. Because the child-like part of me that never goes away or grows old, loves balancing and stepping from rock to rock. She likes to see how suddenly, a journey that looked difficult and hard was actually quick and easy.

It is fun for her and for me.

Aven was crunching pinecones on a trail.

She found it meaningful enough that she took quite a bit of time describing her joy in the experience of it to me.

Then she wrote a poem about caterpillars and butterflies and texted it to me.

And in this moment, I ask myself, “Terra, what does this have to do with the person right now, reading?”

Because even though you are somewhere and someone other-than-me, you also are not. Right now, we are connected. I am thinking about you and I am wondering…how you are and what do you need?

I imagine this is coming to me to write because I imagine you, like me, used to have fun going down slides. Maybe you skip sometimes when no one is watching or maybe you would like to? Maybe you are in wheelchair or struggling in some way and skipping is far from what you are feeling? But regardless of all that, I am certain you have joy in your heart and it likes and wants to be free.

Sitting across from me in my lovely restaurant setting, is my new friend, Mary. We are going to a class together in the city on Saturday, where another new friend and yoga teacher, Mila, will lead us through movements with silks hanging from a ceiling and hoops I have learned are fun and also sometimes hurt my body and intimidate me.

Mila and I in my first hoop class in El Tunco, El Salvador

Mary and I will go on an adventure.

She is young, in her 20s, and recently told me on the beach that she is wondering what to do with her life.

I shared with her that it is ok to live one’s whole life wondering that. For me, I am finally realizing that it really is about the journey.

Right now, Mary is across from me studying at her computer and tossing pieces of her breakfast to two cats standing next to her, waiting for treats.

Mary is cat-feeding.

Aven is crunching pinecones.

And I am writing to you for fun, despite everything. Despite if my mind thinks its good enough or not. Despite monetizing or not monetizing things. Despite anything really.

I am writing to you because I care about you and this is fun for me.

I am writing to you, right now, as an offering and that feels like a good thing to do in this moment.

Do you have a pine cone thing you like to do? Do you like to run on the beach? Maybe you enjoy something simple like watching the steam rise up off your coffee?

Or maybe you like helping people like my new advisor, Jessy? I have read his words to me many times this past week. I am sure he has no idea the impact they have had on me.

There is an energy of support in them that I am learning to receive and Jessy is teaching me:

“The world is still a great place with many good people in it. As dark as the times can look, light will always shine through. I'm honored to be on your team through it all. :)”—Jessy

What you do and how you do it matters. It matters a lot.

There is a lot of programming in our DNA regarding what makes up a meaningful life.

What if it is all about not just knowing what love is, but feeling it in our body.

I know when I skip in the waves, I am feeling “it”—an “it” that is way beyond the words: love, joy, delight, or freedom.

I know when I talk to Mary with her dark brown eyes and go to play with silks from the ceiling with her, there will be a love-thing happening.

I know when I too, feed the little black kitten-cat next to me and talk to it for a moment, it means something.

In those moments, in those moments especially, life has a lot of meaning.

I want to feel them more. I want to experience love flowing through my body.

I told God I wanted to know what love is and God showed me that I already knew. God was right.

But now I am asking something different.

“Hey God. I do know what love is. You’re right. So I want to experience it in this lifetime, flowing through my body. I want to flow with it. I want to release any old programing in my mind and cellular history that says I am not enough. I want to see myself as a beautiful soul on a journey who only ever, has experienced learning opportunities.”

What if there were no mistakes?

How would you feel if that were true?

What thoughts flow into your mind and sensations arise in your body?

Can you love them too? Can you allow them, notice them, be with them, and put a gentle, caring hand on them…if they are ok with that?

Can you feel that yes, despite what you have thought and been told, you are absolutely worthy?

Here is Aven’s final thought for me, regarding my desire to feel comfortable and my need for quality in all forms, in my life:

an allowing of pillowing

the idea that perhaps the pea can be bolstered around and comfort – at least “for now” – attained…

when the princess rolls over, the bolsters get repositioned and comfort attained again…

hmmmm

Maybe those bolsters move a bit when the princess takes a moment to enjoy stepping on a pine cone for no reason other than the visceral and auditory experience of the “CRUNCH!” and maybe when she dances across boulders by the sea, or skips through the waves when no one is looking?

Maybe the princess, and the princes too, simply want to be free?

You can find

aven

’s Substack here.

May your life be a conscious exploration of love and the beauty of who you truly are…