What I No Longer Need to Become
When Shells Sing
Two shells meet at the center of this piece,
their voices joining in a quiet chorus.
Waves of wool radiate outward like sound moving
through water, air, and memory. Bound by branch
and black stitching, the work speaks to the beauty
that emerges when separate beings find
harmony without losing themselves.
Not every song is sung alone.
Some are created through meeting.
Their Blessing:
May you find those who help your truest voice emerge.
May your differences create harmony, not distance.
May what longs to be expressed find willing ears and open hearts.
May your life become a song of belonging.
July Greetings!
Last month, I wrote about finding the pace that lets me stay. A few weeks later, my husband and I moved into a new home. Since meeting twenty-one years ago, we have moved seven times. For most of those years, moving was attached to motion. A new opportunity. A new job. A promotion. The next chapter. The next best thing. There was always somewhere to get to. This move feels different. For the first time, I am not moving toward what comes next. I am moving toward what I hope will remain. A place to stay. A place to age. A place to build a life slowly. And perhaps because of that, I am noticing something I never noticed before: I am allowing myself to arrive gradually.
In the past, I would rush through a move. Unpack everything immediately. Get organized. Get settled. Push through the disruption. Emotionally, I often stayed numb until the experience caught up with me months or even years later. This time, I am trying something different. I am letting myself acclimate. Letting the house become familiar. Letting my body learn where it is. Letting belonging unfold at its own pace. There is a strange tenderness in that. Especially as I continue reflecting on the truths my nervous system has been teaching me this last year and what it has revealed about the ways I learned to move through the world.
One of those things that I am noticing more clearly is how much energy I have spent performing. Performing okayness. Performing capability. Performing organization. Performing resilience. Not because anyone explicitly asked me to. But because for a long time, I didn't realize there was another way. Lately, I have been practicing something else. Telling the truth sooner. Allowing pauses throughout the day. Resting before exhaustion forces it. Letting people see a more honest version of my experience. And while that brings its own discomfort, it is also bringing an unexpected kind of freedom.
The more I practice unmasking "performance" in safe spaces, the more I understand my relationship with energy itself. What drains it. What restores it. What actually matters. I am beginning to see that slowness is not the absence of growth. It may be the condition that allows growth to take root.
This has become especially important during this summer season. Summer asks for movement. More people. More activity. More invitations. More outward energy. And yet, I find myself asking a different question: How do I remain internally slow even when life becomes externally busy? Not withdrawn. Not disconnected. Rooted. Because the older I get, the less interested I am in building a life that looks sustainable from the outside, while it quietly exhausts me from within. I want a life I can actually inhabit. A pace I can continue. A way of being that leaves room for aging, changing, grieving, loving, and belonging.
In a world that asks us to keep moving, perhaps July's medicine is this: Stay a little longer. Long enougOver the past five years, I have returned often to the same place in the upper world during my shamanic journeys, a community of elders built around a great, central tent. I had a small tent of my own to tend to and eventually was invited into the central tent to listen and learn. It became a place of conversation, ceremony, and quiet guidance. A place where I met a future version of myself, accompanied by two trusted guides. Whenever I found myself standing at a threshold in my life or work, I would visit her. She never told me what to do, but somehow she always helped me remember what mattered.
A few months ago, something changed. I was shown that it was time to pack up my tent in the area of the upper world that I would meet with my future self. And so we packed up with no destination, no assignment, no new vision waiting for me. My guides and I walked, and some days we lay beneath the open sky and later rode on horseback and flew on Eagle. I wasn’t given an agenda, and there was no urgency or scribed ritual, only movement.
On the morning of our last Full Moon, I returned again. This time, I found my future self lying still. She had died. My first response wasn't fear, it was surprise and then tenderness. Then a quiet certainty surfaced, letting me know that something significant called for my attention. My guides and I tended to her still form with salve and broad green leaves before carrying her to the water's edge. We watched as she floated slowly toward the horizon and disappeared from sight.
Over the days that followed, I realized I wasn't grieving her. I experienced her death as complete. And I began to let thankfulness wash over me. For years, I had looked to this future self for guidance. This summer, she quietly handed it back to me. Looking back now, I think she was never meant to become my destination, she was a bridge. And bridges aren't meant to become homes, they are meant to get us across. That version of my future self did exactly what she came to do, and now I'm standing on the other side.
As I've sat with the experience, another realization has slowly emerged. The version of my future self I had been visiting was still carrying dreams shaped by an older way of living. She was born during a season when I believed my worth depended on performance, productivity, certainty, and always reaching toward the next version of myself. That wasn't wrong. She wasn’t wrong. She belonged to the woman I was, and she no longer belongs to the woman I am. That realization has been unexpectedly freeing, not because I suddenly know exactly what's next, but because I no longer feel the same urgency to know. I don't need another version of myself to give me permission to begin living this one.
This has all started changing ordinary things for me. I can say 'no' sooner. I’m trusting my own knowing before collecting everyone else's opinions. I have deeper access to remind myself that rest doesn’t have to be earned. I have been creating space to allow simplicity where I once chased optimization. None of this feels like arriving at perfection. If anything, it feels like finally stepping out of the endless project of becoming someone else and slipping into the quieter practice of faithfully being myself.
Perhaps that's August's invitation. Not to imagine a different future but to become more faithful to the life that is already asking to be lived. To trust that what has taken root within us over time can now begin shaping how we live. To remember that there comes a moment when the future self we have been reaching toward quietly steps aside, because she is no longer the one we are becoming.
Much love to you and your spirit,
Sara
P.S. Sometimes we don't need someone to tell us who to become. We simply need someone to help us hear what we already know. If that kind of space would feel supportive, my August and September schedule is open. I'd be honored to walk alongside you.h to feel. Long enough to belong. Long enough to arrive.
Much love to you and your spirit,
Sara
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