F O U R T Y O N E

14 life lessons from the past year

If you prefer, listen to the 6-minute audio recording of this birthday review of lessons here.

1. I didn’t come into this world to get old. I came here to live. And maybe I’m slowly dying and that’s ok. That’s part of living.

2. More and more we are living in an age where the linear time-space-age continuum is dissolving. Into what, I don’t know. Perhaps the emancipation from holding onto it so tightly as a defining measurement and prediction for life. Maybe we are learning to leave more space for the not-knowing instead of filling it with fanciful ideas that we know more than we do.

3. At the heart of my life lies a desire to render all preconceived notions of how life is meant to be lived, irrelevant. And replace them with the liberation that anything goes, that life has no rules, and that anything could happen as long as we all live with integrity in our hearts and devotion to harm no one, ourselves included, in the process.

4. The only way I know how to do that is through experimentation. By being a living, breathing example of what happens when we question the status quo. I don’t get it right, often. There are many failures and errors and backward steps on the path I have intrinsically chosen for myself. But when I do, I feel exalted.

5. I eat food like everyone else but most of the nutrients I crave are photosynthetic. I am nourished by the Sun itself alongside being witnessed and seen in my radiance by those that I love. My lesson, here at times, is to know when to step back.

6. This new solar cycle is teaching me the art of patience and receiving while being a portal — bridged by love and words — between the seen and unseen worlds. Beget by a requirement to witness the parts of me that persist in old wounds to be able to hold that kind of space.

7. The bittersweetness of life is the very chalice that my art and work drink from. The achy splendour of life is only visible because of its brutality. I cannot avert my gaze from those things that cause pain as they are essential to creativity, transcendence, and love.

8. My acute sensitivity to life recognizes that light and dark, birth and death, bitter and sweet are forever paired. Holding them both together embraced as two parts of the whole is where I experience the beauty of life.

9. For every moment I spend tapping away at keys and smiling into cameras and screens — externalised output and engagement — my hands, feet, heart and soul crave time dedicated to the trees, seas, sand, soil and sun — offering internal replenishment — to wanting parts of me.

10. True joy and genuine freedom require sacrifice. It means surrendering the expectations held against us and reimaging a life that is a true expression of who I am.

11. I keep remembering that all I want is to feel happy and beautiful and creative and to be in nature and love and laugh with the humans I treasure. More of that and none of the rest thank you. This means constantly adjusting and edging my choices against what is essential to me.

12. What I lack in blood family I am — a thousand times over — remunerated by chosen family. It astounds me how, over and over again, I am gifted with friendships so deep and meaningful that nourish the parts of me that are wanting. Sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and children and lovers that become part of my heart’s constellation.

13. I crave a home that I can call my own as wildly as I crave the open road. In a world that insists that I choose I am exploring ways that I can honour both.

14. I have more questions than answers. Always.

10 journaling questions to ask yourself on your birthday: