Dear Me: "You are glowing with Love."
A Letter to Ourself: Year 2 (2024)
Dear reader,
I’m so pleased to share with you our second annual Dear Me letter, a community ritual that helps to reveal the brilliant threads that distinguish us and ultimately weave us together. I sent out a call for readers to write a reflective “letter to yourself” here at the end of 2024. I had the privilege of reading them and then editing excerpts together to create this singular “letter to Ourself.”
Enjoy the wisdom, the resilience, the heartache, the beauty. It’s all here for us.
And cheers to you as your new year begins.
Always,
Andrew
Dear Me,
Old dog, you have crossed the Rubicon, and now must learn new tricks (1). Let’s destroy everything and make something new. Built from the ground up. Made of ash and earth, blood and tears and most of all LOVE! Let’s sprinkle in some fairy dust for good measure. (2)
Twas a big year for you. It began with divorce after 39 years and moved into cancer diagnosis, surgery, and is finishing with chemotherapy. You are blessed. (3) Your growth towards non-judgmental presence with all you come in contact with is refreshingly rewarding. Your dedication to self-care, self-compassion and authenticity led you back to where you began many years ago. Thank you for that gift. (4)
At the beginning of 2024 you chose the word trust. Looking back you’d choose the word growth. Maybe they go hand in hand? Maybe that’s what you’re in the midst of learning. Learning to trust yourself in these big moments of growth and change…
And then there is that word that keeps coming up: control. What would it feel like to let go of the desire to control? The thought of it feels freeing and dangerous. To live free and dangerously might be your greatest fantasy. (2)
2024 you “semi-retired” and chose to accept Social Security benefits. Having made that choice, the State then classified you as “Working Disabled,” which is seriously a mind-bender with additional benefits. For choosing time with your children over maximized income, you have gained more. Where you can reestablish your personal balance and boundaries, you will gain materially and spiritually. Ponder this in 2025. (1)
So glad you refused to give up, so glad you held fast to your vision AND took all the action steps, blended with faithful BEingness, to harvest your dream of sharing your life with a supportive, kind, intelligent, healthy, humorous, physically fit hunk of a man. It was worth waiting decades and decades and decades to participate in the Happening. (4)
To want for something so bad terrifies you. How do you trust the pull of something so strong it feels like it could break you wide open? How do you follow the call of something that leads into uncharted territory? How do you start? It is in the sacred pauses that knowing comes. Then it is up to you to choose. You choose your path. The guidance is always there. Are you listening? Do you trust it? (2)
And so you are now “working disabled,” and your stated goal was to stay off roofs and ladders, but in fact, you have been climbing up ladders onto roofs as part of your work. Indeed less, but not yet no more. Pernicious is the half life of old patterns. Be gentle with yourself, fear not, stay the course, and move ever more “boldly in the direction of your dreams.” Be willing to be radical in advancing the greatest good. (1)
And bow in deep gratitude for the kindness you have cultivated for and towards yourself. Recognize the path you are choosing is no longer the path of healing or fixing. Instead it is the path of living, learning, dreaming, accepting and loving. It’s foreign territory and you haven’t got a map, but that feels freeing. And dangerous. (2)
Welcome home to this new powerful partnership and enJOY that beautiful husband of yours. (4) Forward forward. Warmly you go on. (3) You are glowing with Love. (4)
Respectfully, and lovingly,
yours truly (1)
Thank you so much to the contributors to the 2024 Dear Me letter, for making this gorgeous community prayer possible:
Anonymous
Corrine
Jon
Di