Permission to burn.

"Your emotions aren’t threats or burdens. They’re messengers." — Joe Hudson

When was the last time you were about to fall apart,

and instead of holding it together,

you let it happen?

When was the last time it was okay to weep?

How long has it been since your throat yearned to roar, and your body ached to move wildly, freely, and you said, alright, let’s go?

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So, I wrote a whole long piece because part of me still thinks that’s how it’s done. This is what you do. Write a lot of words to get to the point. But there’s a faster way.

The journey out West has been quiet, lonely, confusing, challenging, also beautiful.

A lot of driving and hiking. Movement on the outside. Also: stuckness on the inside.

Things have been shifting. I feel my attention drawn to the voice, to music and sound, to movement. My creative energies are dispersed and writing has been challenging.

Joe Hudson has been a welcome teacher and anchor of aliveness.

I love his work. The man cracked open 500 hearts on a zoom call. Not on purpose. Not for show. Simply in sympathetic resonance of going deep, to the heart, with one person at a time.

That’s it. That’s the piece.

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There is a line I really love from the gospel of Thomas. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” I really love this as an intro to one of the core pieces of our work, which is emotional fluidity. — Joe Hudson

Bliss after the storm. Third rainbow on this trip.

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July in Salmon, Idaho. Very sunny and very quiet. Barely three thousand people. Rabbits hop through the garden and deer stalk the neighborhood looking for tasty twigs. I find a spacious coffee shop, a former bar on main street. Dark and cozy. Perfect for writing. Except it’s not.

Things are stuck. I stare at the page, shuffle through sentences. The words refuse to connect. No momentum. No life. Something is lurking off the screen, in the dark corners of my awareness. But I don’t notice. My mind doesn’t want to go there.

The cafe closes. I drive back up the hill, my mind filled with drafts as dry as the high desert’s sagebrush sea.

In the evening, I watch my neighbor throw balls for his dogs. One evening, a rattlesnake approaches. An excavator has been preparing a nearby plot for construction. Maybe the snake was forced to move? In any event, the dogs bark and the neighbor blasts the serpent with his shotgun. “Over the county line,” he points out (it’s forbidden to discharge guns within city limits). How’s that for excitement?

But mostly, it’s quiet. Lights out at 10. My thoughts drift. How did I get stuck here in the middle of nowhere?

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“If you can't love the thing, love your resistance to the thing.” — Joe Hudson

Sunrise looking east toward Homer Youngs Peak (Montana on the other side)

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A place with nothing going on can be confrontational. Coping mechanisms stick out like sore thumbs among the tumbleweeds. In my solitude I feel drawn to the phone’s toxic twilight. “People don’t want to feel certain emotions for good reason, because they hurt,” says Joe Hudson. “But it is not the emotion that hurts, it is the resistance to feeling the emotion that hurts.”