You'll Be Given Love
you have to trust it
What you seek is seeking you.
~ Rumi
When I was 21, I moved to Boulder, Colorado. I wanted to go to school there because my calves tightened wherever I walked, and the elevation felt like home.
Back then, I knew what I felt, not who I was.
At Orientation, I sat in the back, watching the mouths of the new grad students in my cohort. I stayed quiet until I landed on one who spoke of work. She was telling the other girls that her boyfriend got a teaching offer in Wyoming and was leaving the TA program. She said he was quitting on Dr. Bassoff, who everyone knows is the scariest prof in the program, can you imagine? A girl asked her what you have to do to qualify for the TA job and she said, just be in the grad program, but don’t do it first year. Too much work, and you gotta focus on your studies.
I felt myself fill up with uncertainty, fear, and that tingle you get just before your world tilts and you change along with it.
“Has he let Dr. Bassoff know?” I asked.
Her head spun around to look back at me, as if I had just appeared. “He’s there now,” she said.
I nodded and sprinted down the stairs across the grass toward the faculty building and ran down the hallway, reading name plates until I found the right one. I knocked on Dr. Bassoff’s door.
“What?” he asked, before he even opened the door, “Class doesn’t start until next week, so whatever you need, talk to me then.”
“Sir, I’m here to apply to be your T.A. I heard there’s an opening.”
“As of moments ago,” he squinted, “word travels that fast?”
“I love words,” I said, “I catch them before they land.”
He laughed and left the door wide open as he rummaged around stacks of paper on his desk. He reached his arm out toward me as I stood in the hallway and handed me a syllabus for The Modern Novel.
“What are you good at?” he asked.
“Anything you need me to be, sir.”
I didn’t know what I wanted, didn’t even know if I could want, but my husband and I were both in search of work, and teaching assistants got paid.
“Class starts Monday at 8. Come talk to me after. I’ll expect you to do all the reading, grade their essays, hold most of my office hours, and be on time every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for lectures.”
“Will do, sir.”
“Name’s Bruce. Tell Cathy I hired you and she’ll see to the paperwork.”
He closed the door in my face.
“See you Monday, Bruce!”
My mother was a teacher, but she didn’t tell anyone what to do. Like Jesus, she told stories, and expected people to figure out what she meant.
She worshipped acorn woodpeckers the way some women love their children, with fascination, idealization and a little self-delusion. And she loved to tell stories about them, how industrious they are, how hard they work, how they plan for the future. She taught me to recognize the trees they chose as their acorn granaries, to count the almost countless holes they peck in a single oak (up to 50,000), and told me how they share the acorns buried in their trees only with their small group. She explained how they keep their granary tree exclusive to their clan, how well it feeds them all winter and how they pass on their tree to many generations of chosen family.
And I loved to watch the birds come and go, getting even more active and busy before a storm arrived, nesting together in little groups my mother called a family. Not a family of blood, of course. Because, she said, families are stronger when they’re built on shared values, not nepotism. The acorn woodpeckers choose each other as a clan, a chosen family unit, and they stay in their clans until death (which can be up to 17 years in the wild).
But let me tell you a story she didn’t tell me.
Acorn woodpeckers have a lot of sex. A lot of polyamorous sex. Or, to be more precise, a lot of polygynandrous (multiple male and female life partner) sex. They live in clans of 4-16 birds, who all share a single granary tree, through which they store and share acorns and within which they cuddle and sleep and only have sex with each other.
They bond with each other by engaging in a lot of procreative sex and a lot of non-procreative sex, a lot of simulated sex, and a lot of group orgy-style sex before they settle into the same nesting hole at night. Males do this with multiple females within their clan, females with multiple males and males with males and females with females. But only and always within the same clan.
Or, let me put it this way: acorn woodpeckers are a little like a family cult.
My mother knew this, of course, even though she didn’t explain to me the sexual details of their family structure.
As infants, my siblings and I had multiple caregivers, who rotated in and out of our community and our lives. We weren’t given time to attach, but in time, we learned how to get our needs met by becoming who anyone wanted us to be. Without direct words of love or gestures of affection, our mother prepared us to magnetize our own biological and non-biological clans.
Last week, I felt myself filled with uncertainty, fear, and that tingle I get just before my world tilts and I change.
How do you know what you’re seeking, what you want, deep down? Where do you feel desire in your body? Where do you feel the move toward change?
I don’t always have answers to these questions. What I do know is that the body often speaks before the mind can articulate, and I’ve learned to listen to its whispers. Sometimes it feels like a flutter, other times like a pull—a reminder that even when I’m unsteady, there’s a force propelling me forward, toward something new.
Perhaps that’s the paradox of growing up untethered: the ability to adapt becomes both a survival skill and a compass. It teaches you to trust the strange and beautiful ways life creates openings, like sunlight filtering through dense branches.
In those moments of uncertainty, I remind myself that love and belonging don’t always come from the sources we expect. They emerge like wildflowers in the cracks of a broken path, unexpected, resilient, and waiting to be noticed.
What I’m seeking is not always a destination but a direction, a trust in the unknown, and a willingness to grow roots where I least expected to find them.
Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.
No change, no art.
~Seth Godin
A huge thank you to all of you who are part of this Artist’s Way cohort! The comments section below is designed as a way for you to share your experience this week with other members of our group.
Please answer as many of the following questions as you have time for in the comments section, and feel free to respond to one another as support in our shared journey.
How did it go for you this week?
How many days this week did you do morning pages? How do you feel about this week compared to last week?
How about your artist date? Will you share what you chose to do?
Did you do any of the tasks? If so, which ones? Any discoveries there?
Who contributes to your capacity for delight?
Can’t wait to see all your faces on Zoom on February 1!
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Current Offerings (In-person and Remote)
If you’re in southern California, you’re invited to join me in Foraging for Self-Care: A Nature-Inspired Writing Retreat on March 16 from 9:30-4:30. Reconnect with your writing in nature and in artistic spaces, connecting with an intimate community over a colorful, nourishing lunch. Click here to register.
Artist’s Way group - The Artists’ Way is Julia Cameron’s seminal book on cultivating creativity. There are two main components in her 12-week program: daily Morning Pages (three sheets of unfiltered, anything-goes journaling, written by hand) and weekly Artist’s Dates (solo adventures during which you spend time with your inner artist). Our next cohort will convene for The Summer Solstice on Zoom on Saturday, June 21st at 1:00 PT for 12 weeks of self-directed study and guided support.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we recognize our interbeing, with one another and the anima mundi, supporting each other in growth and recovery, like a mycelial network.
“I love words,” I said, “I catch them before they land.”
This was so delightful and I see it in all of your writing. Thank you for sharing such a beautiful story.
Michelle - Thank you for this work. When I read it, I was struck by the reminder that as children we are introduced to complex stories that we only unpack with adults. Sometimes the nuance can change the whole story itself. You do such a lovely job of hinting at the tension of that complexity, your shifting understanding and the mixed emotion it leaves you with.
Regarding the AW:
1)I did the MP every day. I find this to be a lovely part of the day. I look forward to it. However, I was aware that more doubt and insecurities flowed through on the page today.
2) For the Artist Date, I did something similar to last week, but with a little twist. I had such a fun time looking through old photos, that I picked my favorite three of my grandmother, and I just wrote about what I saw. I tried to imagine what she was thinking, who was behind the lens, where she was, what stage of life she was in, and what happened around her. It was a different way to see her, and I had fun just imagining. I did this while eating at a yummy lunch.
3) I wrote down 20 things I enjoy. These types of activities frustrate me because so many of the things that I enjoy that I am not already doing cost money, which is a limiting factor. That just makes me grumpy.
4) I found a lovely affirmation this week from the Natasha Bedingfield song Unwritten, "No one else can speak the words on your lips." I wrote this affirmation at the top of each of my MP, and it directly relates to some of my insecurities: that I don't have anything that interesting to say.
5) Many people contribute to my capacity delight, from my family to my dogs to the neighbor boy I see running EVERYWHERE he goes (he does not walk, and it brings me joy to see). If I let myself, I can find delight many places.