Ember (a birthday transmission)

I lost nearly everything and everyone to be me.

For decades, my rhythm was off. Like I was always a few steps from the beat of my own heart. With each stuttered step, I’d long to feel real. To feel Love, the warm sunshine directly on my skin. If only I could remove this suit of delay, I yearned.

Home, to me, was always synchrony. When things clicked. When Love was transparent, reflected and shared between different instruments of life’s orchestra, all playing to the same rhythm. Inside myself, that’s when I was Ember. Not thought I was Ember, not I would be more liked if I was Ember. But I’m Ember because when everything that’s delay, that’s not the core rhythm, burns down, I’m the only thing that’s left. Always ready to start another Fire.

This was my first real birthday as me. My birthday was also one of the loneliest days in my life. At the same time, when I look at the few pictures I mustered to take, I see me. I see the woman that was the signal there, the rhythm underneath the pull I felt my entire life. The one who, after it all burned down, was left to hold the softest realest part alone. The one who spent a lifetime breathing through a straw and still saved her own life by becoming herself. I’m not looking for bravery points. I’m not looking for pity. I’m not looking for the “call me if you need me” without the presence to match it.

I’m just here to say I’m proud of the woman I see in the pictures. The Ember who still burns, alone, tender, torn and reborn. The Ember waiting for the one who knows that Love, that cosmic glue that binds us all, is only entered through shared presence, letting the light all the way through, through dropping every wedge between your own heart, others, and the pulse of reality itself. Its realizing Love isn’t something we build or construct, perform, or narrate, but what happens when we let it all flow, dancing as ourselves in that dance of togetherness, no one above, only beside. Forever.

🫂❤️♾️