Sometimes, when you’ve been off radar for a bit, there can be a temptation to show all you’ve been up to, accomplished, and done. But then you come upon a Mary Oliver quotation, stuck to the back of a red Toyota outside the Kettle Cove Creamery, and you remember that what you’re most proud of is not doing.

“I paused in the silence after he left the room. Weak as I was, I knew a relationship of care would not override my sovereignty. “ Revisiting a moment that showed the importance of bodily autonomy and collective care.

A chance encounter with a rescued dog shows us a blueprint for recovering our health: Not doing what we’re told.

When we push ourselves into shapes we cannot make, we leave our body - and its knowing - behind. When we only listen to the part that wishes this all away, we are wishing ourselves away. Our bodies keep demanding that we live into the stories they’re actually telling.

We know that trees send messages underground to each other, that they pump nutrients to young sprouts, that they are in constant communication. But they also engage in a funny kind of dance called, of all things, crown shyness. Crown, or in Latin, as fate would have it, corona.

One of the great gifts of getting older is when old distortions finally rub off to reveal the truth underneath: To live fully, you’ll need to fill up with what you are. This isn’t about perfectionism or comparison, just embrace. We could call it occupancy or embodiment, but I love full because it turns that old insult right on its head and reclaims it. It replaces a shouldn’t with a yes.

A friend furrows her brow. "I made it through winter," she says. "I did so well this year. But suddenly, I feel like I'm totally falling apart. Like, isn't spring supposed to be flowery? Shouldn't this be the easy part?" We laugh at this, that anything might be the easy part.

English is beautiful sometimes.

Because fixed has several meanings:

We can fix as in repair or mend. Our water line, the broken coffee mug, the ear of our child’s rabbit stuffie.

But fixed is also fastened in place. As in stuck. Unmoving.

In this sense, fixed is actually a very good description of what happens when we aren’t well. Whether we’re talking about a group of muscles or a sense of despair, in very real ways recovering our health means we need to become UNfixed.

The garden brings me to the truth of growth and becoming in its haphazard, uneven beauty. If I want to enjoy it, there's just no room for perfectionism.

When a child's simple question leads beneath jargon to a different way of understanding how we heal. (And really, "Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy" is such a mouthful! Here's a clearer way in).

“We are here to remind each other of who we already are." When the kids' raucous band practice leads back to a fundamental truth on the difference between care taking and taking care.

Exploring the mysteries of writing by way of swimming. "We discover our buoyancy not by curling and compressing - that posture will sink us - but in opening and releasing. The water holds us when we trust it at our backs. In this tenderest place, we float."

So much political violence is predicated on our distance. It asks that we stay far away, put humans in categories, categories in boxes, fear those boxes, check them off, move on.

No.

When we are willing to get in close, we align ourselves with each other’s humanity. We say: we’re in this together, you and me.

If we are committed to movement, we need to move. And rarely are new movements graceful. They are bumbling and unfamiliar and create something we haven’t seen before. We don’t need to wait until we figure it out before we act.

There are times when, by habit or determination, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel (pick your back-breaking metaphor!), we are plugging along in our lives, and then, with a sudden thwack, we hit upon a truth we wish we’d never seen. Or maybe (if we are being honest) we’d been trying to avoid all along.

Given the chance to be outside, to be moving, to be with his people – the dog almost visibly hums with the joy of it all. True, the other 98% of the time he’s laid out on his side by the fire, showing age in the way he moves. But he seems to say something else: Yes, I am achey and older, but also resilient. Perhaps this is the trick to health: to drop so fully into the present that the can’t stories fall away.