Now that I’ve put all of this info together I feel SUPER pleased about how much I’ve accomplished. Wow. And to think I was feeling some kinda way about productivity earlier this month… pshhhh.

All of my relaxing or “doing nothing” time is ALSO time that *all the things* are in the process of being done. Things need to marinate sometimes. I cultivate my creative energy by doing things for ME, and the BEST time to create is when I am filled with creative energy, wouldn’t you agree?!

Wow, I’m really typing this to remind myself more than anything. I have such a tendency to push myself to work and check things off to do lists that it’s easy to put myself last. I can talk all day about self care and the importance of doing things for yourself, just because… but when it comes to myself sometimes I forget.

This trip has really helped me remember the importance of just… laying in the grass. Climbing rocks. Crying next to a river. Sitting between two massive trees and watching the wind in their crowns.

We as a society tend to go and do and think about what’s next and and and

I’m catching myself speeding up, feeling more inadequate, more anxious, in my head too much when I’m looking at screens a lot of the day.

There’s been a new kind of anxiety of not knowing when I’ll have internet again, or even phone service because of some of the remote landscape locations I’m visiting. But it’s SO FREEING at the same time.

I have my own full attention. No notifications from the computer in my pocket.

The relief of being completely alone.

I am able to see more details, like the little bird flitting around under the bush, the secret little nook in the hollow of a tree, or the way the light shines through the trees in just the right way to see a spider web high above.

This is my reminder to come back to myself.

This trip is showing me how to just BE with myself. I so often avoid introspection because I have a hard time disentangling my thoughts and feelings and I don’t usually know how to explain what I’m feeling or why. It’s easier to just fill my schedule with tons of things to do so that I don’t have to sit with myself.

That’s made my thoughts and feelings just get more confused and intense and it’s time. Time for me to sit with them. Disentangle them. Ask them their names and why they’re here inside of me. Acknowledge their presence in my life and ALLOW THEM TO BE THERE. Take the time to sit with them, feel through them…. let them tell me whatever it is I need to know. And let them pass.

Time with myself makes me want to spend even MORE time alone. I’m at this point in my life where I feel like I’m finally starting to figure out who I really am. Not what’s been expected of me by our monogamous cisheteropatriarchal racist capitalist society. That version of life is too constricting, too hollow, too exclusionary.

Time with myself allows me to stretch and learn and grow and BLOOM.

And I feel like I’ve only just started.

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