I feel like I’ve been circling, like a bird of prey.
I lived in Petaluma for seven years, on the east side, right up against Sonoma Mountain. It was a crossroads for wild life. Roaming families of turkeys, pooping in the courtyard and drinking from the fountain. Hummingbirds flitting through the flowers, blink and you miss it. Eagles hunting for snacks. Owls landing quietly on a branch of a coastal oak.
Half the wildlife of Northern California - including a Sonoma County badger I named Herbert after I saw him sunning himself on top of his den right outside my home office window - all searching for something, and finding it.
For a long time, I felt like I was searching for something and not finding it.
There was something peaceful about watching a hawk circle, and find what she was looking for. (Even if it’s not exactly peaceful for what was found.) I wanted to let nature take its course. Instead I was a gopher who thought she was about to emerge in a nice patch of zucchini and hit a brick wall.
But after awhile, a few years maybe, I decided to stop searching. One open loop immediately closed. I still don’t know if this was the right choice or the wrong one, but my system settled. Pointing to the right choice, even if I wondered if I made the choice simply to avoid more disappointment.
Once you stop searching for what’s ahead and your system settles, you start getting bored. You might start looking behind you. What’s unfinished? What’s in the ecosystem that needs to be completed so that the next thing can show up?
I kept wanting to add to my work, even when it felt like a chapter was complete. Not the book, I’m not dead yet, but the first era of my transmissions. The first decade from when I began doing this publicly to the moment when things want to evolve.
Hey, my eras are longer than Taylor Swift’s.
So I put all of my work - or, at least, the best of my work - into a vault. A single entry place that feels clean and contained. And my whole system settled. Which, in this era of my life, is the best feeling I could ask for - a quiet body and brain.
Closing the loop on something opens space for what’s next. You don’t know when that next thing will arrive - it could be a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade. But you have to stop circling and land so that it can catch up with you.
I was in a second hand store yesterday, one of the really good ones in Los Gatos where rich people donate their nice, practically-never-worn things, and I was looking at a coat while a young woman near me was filtering through racks. She kept talking about the year 2016. “If I was going to dress up as 2016-era Taylor Swift, this is what I’d wear.” “This store is so 2016.” “If I ever go to a 2016 party, this is where I’ll get my outfit.”
She kept saying 2016 like it was the height of vintage. Which, for someone in their teens, I guess it is. But as someone in her late 40s, 2016 feels like it was basically yesterday. I’m shocked to discover that it wasn’t yesterday.
And then I realized, the Vault spans my work from 2016 to 2026. A full decade, a full era. One that would be considered vintage by someone who’s still in high school.
A decade is not a small moment. Over that time, I built a body of work for myself and people like me. Transmissions to steady a highly sensitive nervous system in a noisy world, to tune in with the deep wisdom that lives within each of us.
The Vault is open. A decade of transmissions, one home, one password. What happens after that is yours. I’m just the secretary.
If your loops feel ready to complete, now is the time.
With love, Amber
