rogue waves

You know those seasons of life when big, challenging experiences crash over you like rogue waves? You think you're floating peacefully in the ocean - eyes closed, head back with your foam noodle, and suddenly you find yourself totally disoriented with sandy water up your nose, seaweed tangled in your hair, struggling to find your footing on the soft, shifting ground beneath you.

Things like grief, and shock, and physical suffering - they can all have this type of rogue wave effect. And sometimes as soon as you think you've found the safety of calm seas or solid ground once again, another wave comes rolling in, and wham - a fresh spiral of the sandy, seaweedy, uncertainty begins.

Whether we embrace or resist these spirals (or maybe we do a little combo of both), we can't deny that they're simply part of human life. I've had an interesting crash course in rogue waves over the past few years. Were they challenging and painful? Absolutely. Was it hard to grasp why and how these things were happening at times? For sure. But the repeated feeling of being thrown into the deep end (I'm just running with the water metaphors, I can't be stopped at this point) also had a tangible strengthening, expansive affect on me.

I've experienced more life - some of my biggest, longest-held fears materialized - and I'm still here breathing, so my nervous system now has the capacity to hold more life. Rogue waves create huge opportunities for recalibration and reorientation, if we let them. I think they may just be one of the most powerful portals to understanding who we truly are, and what's really important to us.

Maybe I'll write about them at some point. Maybe I won't. At this moment, I just know that I'm feeling the pull to share a bit more again. It's like I'm a little snail peeking my head out of my shell after a sealing myself up for a while - and I'm craving the feeling of spaciousness. I want to seek and explore and create that feeling through whatever means possible.

I think spaciousness is balm for the soul - a big, clearing exhale after a deep, nourishing inhale - so it feels good to share the things that bring me more of a sense of it.

That's all for now. I'll figure out the rest as I go. We don't know what the ocean has in store for us anyway, right?

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