Still Here.

I planted things this spring that I may never harvest.

I put my hands in the warm soil and planted the seed, knowing that its full expression may never be witnessed by me. The vision I hold may not be seen with these eyes. But it will be seen. This is a particular flavor of bittersweet: like grief and gratitude holding hands inside my chest. I feel vulnerable suddenly, as I begin to sink into the uncertainty. The unknowing. The liminal space between what once was and what is to be. The kind of feeling I might tend to avoid. But before I could distract myself, a hummingbird hurried by, briefly pausing long enough to look me square in the eyes. Be Here Now. That's her medicine. She always arrives right at the perfect time, reminding me that every cycle of life operates this way. Not in alignment with your schedule, though. More like a divine order of things. Have you noticed that nature never hurries? Bees never worry about proving their worth to the flowers. And the flowers don't bloom in order to impress the bees. They just bloom.

I had a plan. But the land had other ideas.

I've been sitting with the uncomfortable truth that I cannot force things to happen according to my preference. Just like you can't force a fruit to ripen before it's ready. The move I wanted to make this summer is asking me to wait. Maybe not for long — a few more months — but that divine timing still lives in obscurity. And I am learning, slowly and not without resistance, what it means to surrender to something larger than myself. I've been letting the frustration and disappointment move through me the way feelings do when you stop running from them: first uncomfortable, then clarifying, then something that almost feels like relief.

So I went for a swim. The water is always so healing. It's the medicine I reach for first when I'm feeling anxious or dis-regulated. Floating lazily on my back in the sun, eyes closed, turning it all over in my mind — the timing, the uncertainty, the particular helplessness of not being able to make something happen faster than it's ready to happen. When I opened my eyes, a red-shouldered hawk was circling directly overhead.

She has been showing up for me for months now. If the land has taught me anything, it's that you don't dismiss these things.

The hawk's medicine is perspective — the ability to see the whole landscape from altitude while still tracking the smallest movement in the grass below. Macro and micro at once. The big picture and the fine detail. She doesn't panic about where the next meal is coming from. She rides the thermal, she trusts the current, she sees what those of us on the ground cannot.

I took it as instruction.

Last week I got a honeycomb tattoo on my left forearm. Fine line sacred geometry — just the hexagonal pattern, one comb, clean and precise.

As I walked up to the tattoo shop, I noticed the candle shop next door. Above the storefront, large and beautifully made of metal: a flame sign. Not tucked in a window — declared. Announced. Meant to be seen.

Fire and air. Alchemy.

My arms prickled in goosebumps as I stood on the sidewalk and laughed.

This is how nature, universal laws, the divine order of things works — not in the grand announcements, not in the burning bush moments, but in the quiet accumulation of small signs and synchronicities that keep pointing in the same direction. The hawk circling overhead for months. The hummingbird arriving at exactly the right moment. A flame forged above a doorway, the moment I needed to see it, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. The cosmos casually leaving me breadcrumbs to make sure I'm paying the right kind of attention.

The architecture of the honeycomb was never planned in a day. The bee doesn't stand back and worry about how it's going to work out before she begins. She just shows up. She makes the next cell. She trusts the geometry that lives inside her and she is called to express. To create. Cell by cell, day by day, one small act of showing up after another. Something perfect and golden and full of sweetness. Something that began as a thought, a dream — begins to take form.

This is what surrender actually looks like. Not giving up. Not letting go of the dream. Trusting the architecture you can't yet see.

The land will hold you if you allow it. And she will remind you that you always have support and you're never really alone. I've been working with Marigold lately — the threshold medicine, made from flowers that in Mexican tradition line the path between worlds. I didn't consciously choose it for this moment. I just felt called to it, the way you feel called to certain plants in certain seasons in certain places. Of course the threshold medicine arrived when I found myself standing in the in-between.

And Rose. The Fibonacci perfection of Rose. She tends the grief that lives alongside the gratitude. She tends the heart that is somehow both full and aching at the same time. Rose doesn't ask you to choose. She asks you to remove your armor, just long enough to receive.

Elder Flower has been whispering too — the oldest threshold guardian in the European herbal tradition. The grandmother at the door, making sure you're ready before you cross into your next chapter. I think she's been slowing me down on purpose.

This is what nature, the plants, offer us when we are actually open to receive them. They don't magically fix you. They simply help you feel, see, and perceive what's actually true.

So I go back to the garden. I water what I planted. I tend what is here, because here is what I have right in front of me. The cycle that must complete before I can begin anew.

There is a Moon line waiting for me on the other side of the Cascades — the same hOMe frequency that held me in San Francisco for seven years, where the photographer and the anthropologist and the first seeds of the herbalist in me came quietly alive. I remember what it feels like to be held by that place. I trust and have faith in what's coming.

But right now, there is a hummingbird in the Esperanza. There are squash bees in the squash blossoms. There is medicine growing in the soil under my feet, and it is asking me to be present to it for just a little while longer.

I'm still here. And for today, that is enough.