June 22, 2026
There are stones, branches and futures you see in rivers that you cannot see in other bodies of water.
A river is on its way somewhere else and in that way, it is like time. It has its eye on some future spot, where it meets another body of water and changes.
Ergo, therefore: when in doubt about the future, ask a river!
…is my Solstice insight from yesterday. I walked along the Animas river in Aztec, New Mexico and put my hands in the water.
And I saw the future and it was stellar. Made of stars. Literally! that’s where this is all leading.
AUTHORITY
I wonder: is there any fear greater than the fear of doing what makes you come alive? of having to face the whole circuit of judges inside you, all of them yelling “order” as they bang their gavels?
One more word, they say, and we will hold you in contempt of court and throw you out.
If you ask me, that is exactly the kind of place you want to be thrown out of.
Because I will tell you true: I’ve come to see that the biggest problem I’ve had with authority is agreeing with it.
HOW NOW, BROWN COW
You can’t get the elocution out of the brown girl. The one who studied English literature. Art of Fiction and all. Summa cum-Phi Beta badoom, the whole shebang.
Listen, I love my journey. I love my well-articulated, elocuted English. The fact that I know lines from Shakespeare and John Keats’ odes by heart:
“When I have fears that I may cease to be…etcetcetcetc”
But I’m also the woman who did the 'good manners of colonized subjects' and who wants to use this literary-ness, this English-ness, for the purpose of revolution—by which I mean the simple act of liking your brown belly and your hips in all their glorious fleshy width, breadth, height, jiggle.
FIVE LITTLE WORDS
I’m the kind of person who, if she hears those five little words “what I really want to do…”
I. will. not. let. you. be.
till
you finish the sentence.
"Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue."
[see what you made me do, I went into Hamlet]…
UNIVERSE
I’m not saying I’ve read every self-help book out there, but I will say that I am a sucker for them. I think it's connected to the freedom you (may) feel when "look, someone has figured this thing out!'
Along the way, I did have this insight:
all these authors are - in some way shape or form - making themselves the
star
of
their
own
small
universe
They are coming up with a framework in which who they are, exactly as they are, is spectacular. They are saying to themselves—'you need to be the way that you truly are, or nothing else will work.'
FAMOUS FIVE
I grew up reading books by a Britisher named Enid Blyton who wrote about the Famous Five cousins who every summer had adventures. For an Indian girl, living in a city surrounded by family and more family, the idea of going off on your own, in a caravan to a secret island was just... I could hardly stand the feeling. Kirrin Bay. A blue sea. A rowboat. I could hardly stand the freedom.
[Never mind, Blyton also wrote really discomfort-causing portraits of gypsies and Indians. As Bryan Stevenson has said, let’s wait to judge someone for the worst thing they have done.]
Because what she also did for me was inspired a love of making a habit out of having adventures…
COSMOS
The scientist / lyric soul Carl Sagan wrote in his 1980 television series “Cosmos”:
“The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself.”
There's nothing Santa Fe woo-woo about our stellar selves.
Walking beside the river yesterday, I saw stars and floating wisps of cotton from a grove of cottonwood trees.
STARRY STARRY FUTURE RIVER
Something is coming June 29.
I don't know what it is yet.
It'll be audio. It'll be on my website. It'll be an adventure.
The only criteria is that it must make me come alive.
Or else *!**!! :)
RESILIENCE
See, the other thing that those self-help book authors do is every time they take a step, they have the weight of this whole universe they have created behind them, egging them on to just go for it.
Because we have no idea what’s going to happen when we put things out in the world.
Some adventures we have the stomach for and others we don’t. But we discover who we are by going on the caravan to the treasure island over the hill and down to the secret cave through which there is an even more secret cove and through it all, the bracing wind, the sound of the sea, the sun on your skin, being outdoors all the live long day. That. We want that.
STANDING UNDER STARS
Listen, you can be the star of your own big universe if you like.
I just like the humility of a small universe first—but hell-O, you go for it if you want.
Either way, you’re gonna have to stand how good you feel about yourself.
Can you stand it?
