08/30/2026
Facebook Memories is a strange thing. A digital record of our past, filled with moments in time. Footprints in the sand. An echo of what once was.
Today, I was reminded that it is the nine-year anniversary of the death of a friend & former doula client. We met when she was seeking out a prenatal yoga teacher. Months later, her arms were wrapped around me as I helped support her body while she birthed her son into the world.
Her body has long since returned to dust- the same dust that came from the stars above.
Time continues on. The world keeps spinning. Every day, people are born & people die. I have witnessed both, sometimes from remarkably close range. Death is inevitable, yet my mind wanders toward another direction: what happens to us when we become disconnected from the things that make us feel alive.
I notice something familiar in the flowers.
It is late summer, & the Queen Anne’s lace is prolific, shooting from the earth in abundance. Ethereal & delicate, it blooms beneath the sun, taking in the remaining days of the season.
And then I cut it.
I bring it into the studio and place it in a vessel. For a while, it remains beautiful. But separated from the earth that sustained it, something begins to change. The stem softens & the delicate white blooms bow their heads. What was once growing is now slowly fading.
I wonder how much of being human is remembering what we are still connected to.
Some things nourish something essential in us- people who allow us to feel known, work that gives our lives meaning, places where our bodies soften, and experiences that return us to awe & wonder. When we lose contact with those sources of nourishment for too long, some part of our aliveness can begin to wilt.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons flowers continue to teach me so much.
They remind me that being alive is more than simply continuing to exist. There is also the question of what we are rooted in while we are here.
And time, indifferent and faithful, keeps moving.
The Queen Anne’s lace blooms. Someone enters the world. Someone leaves it. And for however long we are given, we must keep reaching toward what feeds us.
