Now Open for Abundance

Diary entry on continuing to reorient, recognizing abundance, and doing the scary thing

The sky here in Wisconsin has found itself replaced with wildfire smoke that continues to move down from Canada, diminishing our air quality to such a severe degree that the number on IQAir reads nearly 500—hazardous.

That low tolerance for discomfort I wrote about last week came creeping back in this a.m. when I realized I needed to pivot all my plans for the day. My only free morning at home for the whole week, and I had looked forward to it, craving a long, slow walk with the dog, followed by writing time on the patio. I briefly tried to bargain with reality, but my throat already hurt from the little exposure I had to the smoky air yesterday. Okay, pivot indeed.

As I reoriented myself in the day and cancelled my evening plans to walk (lol!) with a new friend, I was thrilled to find that, although my low tolerance for discomfort remained, so did my elasticity from dealing with it last week. A reframe then—I had an entire day all to myself. No plans or obligations or due dates! All of the pesky tasks I ignored as I popped from meetings to hangs to deadlines for the past three days finally got my attention. Also, my words. I journaled and then meditated on a few new poem ideas. I drank coffee at the table. I disregarded time. I napped. JUICY. Sometimes pivots become the thing that’s actually the most needed.

Earlier this week, during our second round of scorched-earth (to me) temps, I returned to a piece I wrote last year about the blessed cruelty of summer. I needed to recommit to the sentiment, another type of reorienting in a circumstance I find difficult to tolerate.

In other news…

Most of my garden didn’t meet the soil until the second week of June. I’ve been worrying over the plants, chatting them up, hoping I didn’t sow too late. Despite my delay, the garden blooms and greens and lushes itself out more every day.

The tomato plants held silent fireworks one night, and I awoke to a plethora of blooms. Many of those blooms have now turned to green fruit, and I pine after their ripening almost every day. The cucumber plants I drove to Indiana for are climbing the homemade trellis, already blooming too, but I keep clipping those yellow beauties off. I want the vine to grow just a week or so longer before energy gets diverted to growing fruit. Everything else is bonus—the pepper plants find themselves more everyday, the beets dig down, and the green beans whisper that they might shoot out blooms any day now.

Everything hints at abundance, and I await that arrival a bit nervously, scared as I always am that it’ll change its mind last minute.

Abundance has been teaching me to trust it in other ways, though.

Last month, I challenged myself to start attending events solo. I went to a different creative event every day for four days straight to try to dampen some of the fear I have around being alone among strangers. Can you believe that it worked?

I had settled for just surviving the experiment, but instead was met with such a generosity of spirit and connection—a true abundance—that I fell in love with humanity all over again. Those four days spider-webbed out in so many genuinely beautiful ways, leading to coffee dates and new friendships, emails and texts full of ideas that have sparked collaborations (!!), and so much more.

As I was processing all that has flowed from those four days with a few of my beloved cousins, one remarked something about—see, it works. It being the risk, the trying, the doing of the hard or new or scary thing. Indeed, it does, and sometimes abundance attends the working to make it even sweeter.