The garden waits, its pulse separate from mine— a thousand roots threading through their own decisions.
I have pruned too much, watered from lack of rain, guarded what would have done better left alone.
Too much, even when well intentioned, is still too much.
Now, I watch the kale bolt, the papaya’s thin trunks leaning toward the light, the self-seeded oregano flowering without a care in the world.
Everything knows what it’s doing. Even the dying has its place.
I bow to this unmanaged wisdom, and, after feeling at first like I could have, should have done more, in the end, feel the relief of not being in charge.
From the cradle to the grave, life presents itself in thresholds.
They arrive without announcement. A pause in the air. A shift in the body. Something loosening, something tightening.
I have learned to notice how they come— not as crises, not as summons, but as moments that ask for orientation. A quiet recalibration. Feet finding ground again.
Thresholds do not vanish when they are ignored. They wait.
Momentum gathers regardless, drawn by an inner compass that cannot be reasoned with. It moves according to attunement, according to something beneath language.
I no longer think of this as a spiritual journey. It feels closer to a soul one. A life inviting itself forward.
Growth, as I’ve seen it, rarely arrives through force. Pressure accumulates only when there is no room left for listening.
What is resisted does not leave. It lingers. It circles.
Over time, the distinction becomes clearer— between what I believe and what I know.
Belief lives in structures, in inherited frameworks, in explanations that promise certainty. Knowing lives elsewhere— in the bones, in the marrow, in the body’s unarguable response.
I have noticed how different we are in this. How wiring, conditioning, and culture bend us toward certain paths and away from others.
Still, there is a shared instinct: to pause when something subtle calls for it. To wait until a signal makes itself known— through sensation, through timing, through an almost imperceptible easing.
The road forks more often than we admit. Choice is rarely dramatic. It usually feels like a small turning.
I have learned that waiting is not absence. Answers arrive in their own way, without being forced.
Pushing tends to produce conclusions before they are ready. I have done this. I have borne the cost.
When I release the pressure— when I stop biting down— movement resumes on its own.
Like a wave gathering, finding its shape, then rising, and landing— steady, without strain— on a vast, sandy shore.
People talk a lot these days about positivity, manifestation, high vibes, and re-imagining your life into one long upward spiral. But the older I get, the more I realize I have always been a realist — nothing more glamorous than that, nothing less profound.
Realism gets a bad reputation. People confuse it with cynicism, or fatalism, or depression. But realism is none of these things.
Realism is the simple, steady ability to look at life as it is — not as you wish it were, not as your childhood said it should be, not as spiritual bypassing tells you to pretend. Just as it is.
Realism has kept me grounded through loss, through love, through estrangements, through miracles, through my own evolution. It has allowed me to live without bitterness — because bitterness grows from unmet expectations, not from clear-eyed living.
Realism doesn’t demand that life be beautiful. Realism lets life be beautiful when it is beautiful. No pressure. No performance.
Realism doesn’t avoid suffering. It also doesn’t dramatize it. It says, “Yes, this happened. And what now?”
Realism says: “I’ll meet the world truth for truth. I don’t need illusions to steady me.”
There is a kind of spiritual glamour in pretending we can transcend the human condition. Realism rejects all that performance.
It says: People are complicated. Families are imperfect. Love is precious but not guaranteed. Growth doesn’t arrive in a neat curve. People hurt each other, sometimes deeply. People heal, sometimes slowly. Not every story has a reunion. And that’s okay.
Realism allows me to hold joy and loss without pretending either one erases the other. Realism allows me to love estranged loved ones fiercely and accept that they may never return to complete an arc of my heart’s desire. This is not tragedy — this is adulthood.
Realism keeps my heart open without being naïve. It keeps my mind clear without being cold. It lets me move forward without dragging grief like a stone behind me.
Realism means I don’t cling. I don’t distort. I don’t rewrite history to feel better, and I don’t exaggerate it to feel justified.
Realism is simply presence, uncluttered. It is the worldview that lets me wake up in the morning, look around, and say: “This is what life is today. And I can meet it.”
It’s not stoic. It’s not hardened. It’s not negative. It’s honest. And honesty — not hope, not fantasy, not spiritual slogans — is what keeps me sane.
If realism has taught me anything, it is this: When you stop demanding that life match your expectations, you can finally live the life you actually have. And it turns out, there is grace in that. Sometimes even joy. Always freedom.
I’m not sure I need time — at least not as it’s commonly considered. It’s simply what we’re given, like it or not, for as long as we draw breath: a new sunrise, a fading sunset, and the spaces in between, where we live out an unknown number of days on this breathing planet.
Time to ponder or to provide, to nurture, to rest, depending on the moment and the hands we’re dealt.
There is time for mountains to rise, for seas to tumble rhythmically on distant shores. Time for ground creatures to burrow in before winter, for hawks to circle rivers and fields, searching — always searching — for what sustains them. Time for trees to grow or go dormant, for planets to whirl their patient orbits — there is time.
How we humans engage time is another matter. We guard it, chase it, curse it, as though it had power over us. But time simply is. Rushing or hoarding has never bought us one more minute in an hour or one more day in a year.
Perhaps all that’s left is to flow with it — scheduled or not — to find our own rhythm within its turning frame. We can wrangle with it until the end, but still, it will roll on.
And maybe that’s mercy: that time needs nothing from us but our willingness to live inside it — fully, gratefully, while we can.
“Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” — Anonymous
Wisdom, it turns out, can live on a refrigerator magnet. I needed these words — after a month on the mainland, city after city, traffic jam after traffic jam, my teeth on edge, lungs parched with the dust of urgency.
Between the asphalt and the glass, small oases shimmer — greens and blues, pines, firs, roiling rivers — brief reprieves in the mad rush of civilization.
I live on a speck of earth in the Pacific, a place too quiet for most people — which is a blessing. Tradewinds cool the air, the ocean breathes around us, and hula’s soft gestures mirror the island’s rhythm, its marriage of strength and grace.
Yet the question returns: what is peace, if it can only be found where peace already reigns? Am I meant to test myself in the noise and mayhem, to measure my progress by endurance?
If so, I fail — not dramatically, but tenderly. My skin draws tight, grief lodges like a stone. The distance between my daughters and this island is both balm and wound, Prometheus chained to love and letting go.
I see others aging quickly beneath the weight of loss, and I ask myself: how to keep choosing happiness when separation is the constant undertow?
Perhaps detachment is less about turning away and more about softening into what is. Those who preach it may never have held their own children’s futures in their hands, then released them to fly toward other lives.
As always, there is purpose in the pain — something new being born beneath the ache.
So I return to what is steady: the sea, the home, the hands that cook and tend, the husband, the dogs, the mystery.
I could write about the tiny Arabian horse, her pale matted coat grown to maximum for the winter, nature knowing what her children need toward the end of life – once luster and beauty as only youth can confer – later, stripped back to essentials, hip bones protruding over swayed back, the preciousness of her fragile locomotion, the gentle spirit;
Then there’s the big white Lab, black eyes full of fathomless joy at our arrival, departure, the smallest things as perhaps only dogs appreciate in that canine way, his considerable bulk leaned against my body as I come closer, claiming me before his jouncy friend and companion has the chance;
The world lost both within two days of late, and I am left to ponder the transience of life on this planet, how what seems unfair is simply what is, the twisted gnarly trunk of the cedar, twinned to the pine in youth, never able to break free and take a form more pleasing, the coupling of two cutting life short for both, neither able to fully flourish; and how are we so different? Where we choose to invest our energy, how we support others with or without their appreciation, leaning into the wind or onto one another for support, gazing at the landscape around us with wondering eyes, taking for granted our singular human capacity to notice and imprint, categorizing each encounter with emotional hues, pleasing or not, while these unconditionally loving four leggeds greet us afresh and anew, as if we have not cast a single black mark on this wide, wide world.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
I may not have learned this from any other human being, either through words or actions, but I have absorbed it well from the guardians of Earth, though it has taken me half a lifetime;
Life balances best when I resonate not to the siren’s shriek, but by tuning into subtle frequencies, like the low hum of a spiral shell pressed to the ear, ocean vibrating its wise message into its tiny bones;
The advice I have absorbed is not to scatter into every storm, but to drop roots, to anchor in the fertile soil of resonance;
The earth knows how to ripple and pulse; her rocks remember the crackle of ancient fires; trees bend but do not forget how to whisper the winds that tease branches; river water sings its way over stones, through roots and into the waiting mouth of the sea;
When the haze comes and I can no longer see the shore, I listen; does this path unfold gently beneath me, does it nudge and eddy around my ankles, does it steady me? Or does it distort and hollow me, draw me away from my own ground of being?
The body answers. The waves answer. The stones answer. The trees answer. Always.
To live by resonance is to live by the rhythm of tides as they ebb, flow, release, return. And it has cost me.
I have watched beloveds drift, have let go of battles that could have rooted me in bitterness; but resonance always restores me to myself, like rain returning to parched soil, like green shoots pressing through volcanic ash, like salt air seeping into weary bones;
I am not the siren. I am the tuning fork, struck by the hand of the Divine, ringing through fields and gardens, shore and stone, until the hum meets itself again in the heart of all things.
belas bright ideas 