“Love is the frequency that puts everything else in order.”
– Jane, the International Astrologer
My word for 2022 is connection, and in the beginning of the year, I wondered if it was possible to witness yourself falling in love. I wanted to be totally aware of the feeling as it was happening, building over time, slowly and then all at once.
I already knew what connection felt like; it feels like a knowing. Something in the way words are not needed, confirms an intuitive belonging to a place, or a person. How else to explain the throbbing in your chest and this feeling of relief?
This is the deep exhale I released the first time I rested my head on Denver’s shoulder, sitting by the Platte River and watching the water rush. And when my brother and I visited Moab last fall, I was determined to insert a Taylor Swift lyric from her song “Delicate” to describe a photo of the Delicate Arch we had just adventured to.
“The lyrics won’t work, it’s too romantic,” my brother said.
“You can fall in love with places,” I assured him.
You can also fall in love with things, particularly the act of trying new things: snowboarding, snowmobiling, XC skiing, guitar, records, crop tops, haircuts, cigarillos, books. Being a beginner means to begin again, and that’s exactly what I’ve spent the first three months of the year doing. Without a doubt, it has put joy and play at the center of my heart.
To have a peaceful mind and light heart is to be in spirit, open, and desirous of animating the body and expressing the soul. I think this is the ultimate attraction, and it’s a place that feels new to me because it hasn’t been a fleeting, flash-in-the-pan sentiment, but instead it is something that has sustained me greatly over time. In fact, operating from this place has given me so much more energy – the speed of rolling down a hill or the power of the wind at your back; aligned and locked in to a force much greater than you. With snowboarding, it’s gravity but with life, it’s love. We owe it to ourselves to ride this wave.
One of my writing professors once said, “What we don’t know about ourselves, what we are unwilling to know about ourselves, will inevitably get in the way of our art-marking.” I am starting to see who I am when I’m in love, and this is the place I want to create from.
Inspired Scribble 