Before the world asks anything of you, pause for a moment, take a breath, gently ask yourself, what is quietly beginning? 

 Some beginnings don't look like beginnings, they look like delays. 

 Like something that should have been so simple taking much longer than you expected. 

• Like wrapping a gift and the paper tears, 
• or the folds don't line up. 
• The edges don't meet the way you thought they would. 

You smooth it out, you try again, and somewhere in that quiet effort, something else is happening. 

• Learning, patience, 
• care, attention, 
• love trying to manifest and take shape, because the feelings are so big, even wrapping paper, the best, bows and ribbons can't contain it. 

A friend of mine is beginning a cross country journey in an RV, miles of open road... And beside her sits her husband, living with ALS. There is no perfect way to prepare for something like that. 

Only small moments, packing, planning, holding things together best you can.  From the outside, it's courageous.  But inside that kind of beginning, there are pieces that don't fold neatly. 

Fear, grief, love that doesn't have a clear place to land, and I watch them both from afar and admire the bravery that I see in that little RV that's going across the country. 

And then there are other moments where the wrapping has already been torn open. 

I read a message this week. 

He lost his life partner about a year or so ago, and now he lost his sister. 

Not one loss, but another arriving before the first had had anywhere to land. 

He said, 'She isn't here. Not in the kitchen, not in the quiet, I can't read to her anymore.' 

Everyday moments that made life feel familiar.  And what's left doesn't feel like it has any meaning. 

It's just space. 

He said he would survive, but that's all. 

There's a big difference between surviving and thriving. 

And maybe the hardest part was not feeling the love people said was there. 

It's one thing to say I love you, it's another to show it. 

There's a kind of honesty in that that doesn't need to be corrected, because not all grief feels like love.  Sometimes, it feels like absence stacked upon absence. 

And yet, in one place, someone is still wrapping, still tending,  still holding something together with care. 

In another, the wrapping is gone, not once, but again and again,  and the space it once held feels even quieter. Both are in the in between. Both are expressions of love, one still being shaped, one already open more than it should have been. 

If you're the one holding it together,  if you're the one standing in what's been torn open, if your days feel like effort or emptiness,  you are seen. 

Not for how well you carry it, not for how neatly it all comes together, but for the love inside it, even when it looks messy, even when it feels unfinished,  even when it feels like too much has already been taken. 

While the person that has an affliction, cancer, ALS, other disease, terminal illness,  gets the focus, you, the person behind them, the person holding them up, the person trying to put the pieces together, trying to make the wrapping paper fit an unbelievably sized so called "gift," you are the one that sometimes is invisible. 

But right now, you are seen. You are loved, and you are not alone.

__________ XO

The New Moon phase often asks us 

When the paper tears,

• and doesn’t  fold the way you planned…

what is still inside,

waiting to be held?

🌙