Hello Friends,

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As we approach Equinox, it feels a fitting time to return to this practice of connection, expression and service. It was just before the last Equinox that I signed off, preparing to welcome a new life. In the time away from this letter, my own life has changed in a great many ways. I am confident that these changes will work their way into some of my coming reflections but just to summarize, in the last six months:

• Stella was born and spent the first month of her life hospitalized
• I left my partner of 8 years, father of our 2 children
• I transitioned out of my full time job to launch a consulting business with a dear friend and colleague

There, a few bullet points. Yet they hold layers upon layers of meaning and experience. Disappointment, heartbreak, grace, awakening, and gratitude are just a few of the many energies dancing through my life in these times. So as I return to my practice of writing and sharing, I am uncertain exactly what will come forth. I look forward to sharing this next season of life with you and give thanks for your interest, your trust, and your feedback.

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Please forgive me that due to some website hiccups, the entire missive will be in the body of this email (see the PS below for more context)

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Monthly Missive

There, on paper, lie a few sentences that summarize the changes of my life. Yet how can these simple words capture the profundity of these seismic shifts? I write to express and move so much of what is in me. I dance for the same reasons. What is the way to bring the dance to the page? To move pen on paper in swirls and sighs and glorious movement? How might I paint a picture for you of all that is evolving in my life, the intimacies and intricacies of such massive transitions?

It is through these two practices - writing and dance - that I have survived, no, thrived through these transitions. It is with these two invaluable gifts that I face the season that stands before me. With these two ways of processing, moving, expressing, exploring, inquiring - I feel invincible.

Well no, that’s not it. What is the opposite of invincible? Is it vincible? As if a hole could be poked in me? As if a thousand holes have been poked already? As though every precious hole pours forth the essence of who I am. Pours my pain and blood and joy and beauty down to the blessed earth as an offering, a prayer, rich fertilizer for all that is to grow.

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What do theses gifts demand of me?

They demand the release of perfection. Allowing that there may be words misspelled or poorly chosen. Commas misplaced. Steps stumbled over. That there are forms and structures and shapes I may never be able to make. Yet, I will make just the shapes that I am meant to.

To come to full maturation both gifts also demand that I open up to be seen. Of course, I have a choice. No one is forcing me to share words with you or to dance where others might see me. Yet to truly reach maturation I commit myself to dance and to write as though no one is watching knowing that someone is, could be, will be. I dance knowing that what I dance is a message, an expression just as potent as the words that pour forth. Each is a prayer, a poem, a way of speaking.

Yes, I can be selfish. I can embrace the season of going inwards. Of notebooks filled with only my own most personal feelings. Pages upon pages scrawled, giving voice to the parts inside clamoring to be heard. Letters written that will never be sent. Movements made that no one shall ever see. Dances purely my own.

Yet, after watering the ground with so many tears and planting pages and pages and footsteps upon footsteps, it is time to bloom. To open the shutters and call out the window and say: “here I am”. I’ve been in here and now I am ready to come out. Here is what I have learned. Have you?

I need you. you need me. we need each other as an interconnected web of being, of loving, of fucking up. Let me place this here, on the altar of our shared experience, on the altar of imperfection and messiness and forgiveness and learning. That we might forge the way(s) to be better humans. Better lovers. Better dancers. Better parents. Better children. Better writers. Becoming better simply by being perfectly imperfect works of art.

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I know there is so much to give. To receive. to channel through these modalities and offer up in service. I am grateful I can see the trajectory, the culmination, the convergence of so many learnings bringing me to where I am.

I can see how the divine sense of timing has been at play. The need to dance and swirl and tread in and out, forward and back. Knowing, deeply knowing the changes that are needed for the best of all involved. What my soul is calling for, what my knowing knows. How it can be so clear and yet, not the right moment. Then, all of a sudden , it is. Some times it is shaped with precision and care and spreadsheets and plans. And sometimes simply forms in the underground. In the dreams layering on top of each other, in the journal entries that show these patterns over and over again. In so many conversations finally allowing me to convince myself of the truth that my beloveds have seen and known for such a long time already. Then one day, it bursts through to the surface like a seed finally germinated.

These gifts, these tools these ways of seeing, of knowing, of coming to know. They are what have allowed me to tread this time with grace, with tenderness, with a rising and falling tide that rocks my boat yet always lulls me to sleep with the crash of the waves, that most treasured of sounds. Like the heartbeat of mama in the womb, that reassuring rhythm. Yes it ebbs, yes it rises. It takes me with it on a journey and yet - I can know look over the gunwales and see the sea and say to myself, thank you creator. Thank you for reminding me that I alive. that my life is an in breath and an out breath and a holding and a releasing and a giving and a taking and a dance of forward and back and all around.

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Landscape

To accompany the changing season (of my life and of the planet), I crafted a cross-genre playlist. May it aid you in ushering the new and writing your own new chapter.

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With Gratitude,

Kate

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PS You may have notice a minor change in my name and email address. Andlund was a pseudonym forged from my last name and that of my previous partner. Untangling the threads of an 8 year relationship requires me to extract his name from mine. I have thus returned to using my given name and intend to continue using it for the rest of my career. A few broken links are a fair price to pay for my own sovereign identity.

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