When you can hold the scroll of your Life

And track [the magic] the patterns 📜

Yesterday, I brought myself to the bay at high tide. Families were already speckled along the shore. Umbrellas and sunscreen and sun hats. Little ones wading into the water with a parent close behind. The water was cooling. The waves easy and inviting against my thighs. I stood, with hands against my lower back for longer than usual. Breathing in the shifting colors, the fog having burned off the sky. Birds only half-curious as to what we humans were up to. The tiniest of fish curled around my feet.

And there’s a moment I track. For me its when I’ve gone into the waters about pubic-bone level. And I haven’t yet taken the leap to dive all the way in. In my belly feels sensitive and exposed, I couldn’t possibly!, while my heart knows the submersion is coming— craves to be submerged. And there’s an in-between and a waiting stage, until there’s the moment where you just have to do it. Crashing into the change, you will be wet, on the other side.

I’m finding that sensation a lot these days. A friend reflected to me the other day, ‘it’s almost like when you’re going up the rollercoaster, and there is that click click click click, and you know you’re about to take a ride.’ A lot of Life has felt like that in this last month. Perhaps why I have been more silent here. On the brink of so much change — some of which I will speak to in weeks to come — and most of it is good change, pieces I have in fact prayed for, longed for and called in.

And also there is the undeniable awareness that there is another version of Life close by, ‘another side’ if you will. That soon I will be drenched in it— and different.

There’s this thing that can happen when we’re in this ‘before moment’— this place I lean into when I teeter into the fear of it— and we start to notice the through-threads. We start to notice the patterns, Life’s lip marks or fingerprints. We see it goes way back before now.

It’s not that suddenly ‘it all makes sense.' But, it is a cousin of that. The feeling that you are part of some intended design.

For me, water has been a through-thread this month. Seeing her in so many pivotal moments of my life.

And so I offer this letter to you as its own capture of her here. The way a distinct memory can feed you long after it is gone. The hope that such a memory might enliven something in you. Where you recognize all the ways you have been held. All the breadcrumbs leading to now.

The distinct memory of walking a winding path to the beach in Tarifa the summer after my 30th birthday. I am with my boyfriend and his family at the time. We are staying at a gorgeous AirBnB bungalow on the hill; I have snuck out the side. I remember the sun is fierce on my skin, the branches scratch my calves, and I don’t know exactly where I’m going. But the waves are calling, and so I follow their sound. The path spits me out onto the shore eventually, and I am left remembering a part of me that has been asleep for what feels like a decade.

For she is the version who traveled to Spain a decade before. And five years before that. The version who followed a call that she couldn’t quite name, and yet didn’t feel the need to explain it to anyone. The version who knew what it was to spend real and meaningful time by herself. And this same version who [edgy at the time] took off her bathing suit top and plunged into the water. The ocean perfectly cold and yet surging around her nipples and breasts.

Shortly after returning from said trip, I will stop taking birth control after 15 years. I will buy the tome of a book, Taking Control of Your Fertility, and begin to learn about my hormones like their own holy braille. Shortly after, the relationship I am in will dissolve and I will move to New York for what will be my dream job at the time. Some part of my soul now awake in me.

The distinct memory of coming to Cape Cod in April of 2023. My grandfather has just passed 2 days prior; I have been lucky enough to hold his feet as he crossed. I am with my [not yet] husband, and his cousin’s daughter on the trails by Marconi Beach. It is an unlikely blue sky, the rare kind of spring day where the Cape is not yet crowded and yet somehow, the lucky human you are, you get to play in her landscape. We are here to look at a house, at the time considering both Hudson Valley and the Cape as our next place to land. And I hear the distinct voice, you will become a mother here. And though securing our now home will come with its usual real estate complications, we will move into a house with lilac bushes and so many projects that my beloved will take on with gusto. I will sometimes think he is crazy and yet often be grateful that he dreams them anyway. And we will call it home, and get married 9 miles down the beach, and my best girls and mom will come ready me in the upstairs bedroom before we do.

The distinct memory of the Buck Moon in July of 2023 and we are camping on our dock in Michigan. Another ‘with gusto’ idea of my [not-yet] husband to drag an old mattress from the attic down to the dock and set up a mosquito net around it for the full moon. In 37 years of going to Michigan, this has never been done before, and yet I fall asleep hearing the boats rocking in their beds and it is perfect. The water is so close, I wake up and sometimes wonder if I have in fact floated into it. I blink my eyes open to a giant cookie moon rippling over the lake. And I feel that inhale before the exhale, the gurgle of change afoot. The feeling that the two of us will now become three. Two weeks later, we will pick up our sweet Conita on our drive back to the Cape. She will be squeamish, and [not-yet] husband will at first question if this is a red flag. But I will lock eyes with her and I will know. And she will teach me [with more humility] about motherhood than any four-legged creature ever could.

The distinct memory of March 2025 and I am with Conita in front of the pond a half-mile from our home. We have started to come here almost daily. We see the shifting colors of the water, the ways that sometimes the waves kick up and sometimes the edge is as smooth as glass. Often there are swans. We say hello. But on this morning, there are two swans right by the clearing which we walk to. Two swans so close that Connie plunges into the water to greet them. Connie! I call as the Internet says swans can be so aggressive. She swims back to my side and I remember distinctly a sensation through my heart and my womb that I have never felt before. A warmth, an opening. A part of me coming undone. I close my eyes and I listen, and I hear what the waters have to say. And I go home with a knowing. Of the things that might one day be.

I am finding, Love. That there is a me. And there is a thing I’m in relationship with [the birth control, the ex-boyfriend, the dream job, the home, the new boyfriend, the dog, my womb]. And then there is this space in-between.

And if you’ve been here before, you’ve heard me speak to this. The way I might try, like we all do, to subscribe words to this space. Words we might fumble with like God or Universe or Life or Nature or Mama Gaia or ancestors and guides or however we try to quantify these things we cannot see.

But I am finding that there is so much for us to receive when we can create relationship with this in-between space. When we can track all the ways it has been speaking to us, calling to us, leaving lip marks and fingerprints in our changing moments and seasons.

When we track the through-threads of where we have always been seen. Always been held.

For me, these moments where I am often—
in my body
surrounded by the wild or the alive things
the constant shifting and yet loving tides of water
with space for me to track myself within it all
with space to be surprised

I can wholly appreciate, Love, if sometimes in big moments of chaos or change, you feel as if you are forgotten. Left behind. Alone.

And. I would invite you. In that feeling. To get some rest. And then when you are able. To hold your own life as her own sacred scroll.

To trace your fingerprints over the holy braille of it. To track the patterns. To feel into the alive parts, the parts where you could feel or hear the other thing in the room.

And to create so much space to notice these. Today and tomorrow.

And the next day.

To let yourself be surprised.

With so much Love,

Erica

🌟 I will be sharing a new 4-week group immersion more publicly tomorrow!, but for you & here, a sneak peek now. Click the image below, and tell me. Where are you feeling your art or your artist come alive?

And/or, does she feel very far?

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