benevolent forces
it's very important we show up and remember.
I’ve been noticing what filters in through marketing emails (because of the secret language). This week, I got one that said, LETTER FROM YOUR FUTURE SELF: “You don’t need to force it. You don’t need to chase. The best things are going to happen when you learn to sit with nothing happening at all. Trust the people who are for you will show up.”
I travelled to Pittsburgh for the ABA Winter Institute last week. I was very scared. I maybe managed to look sort of normal. I was busy scanning everything and everyone, absorbing, listening, trying not to hide, trying to show up as fully myself as possible. I’m always looking for benevolent forces to arrive.
At the grocery store yesterday, while carrying a box of mandarin oranges, the paper handle ripped. My oranges fell and rolled all over the parking lot. An elderly woman wearing a long purple coat came up to me and said: “It’s so hard to have so many things in your hands.” She murmured other things that felt comforting and I was somehow grateful the box handle had ripped. She helped me pick up my oranges, and then she looked at me with her warm and knowing eyes, and I thanked her. Benevolent forces.
Sometimes, we don’t notice that we have a lot of things in our hands, that we could put them down and wait for benevolent forces.
I signed many books for booksellers in Pittsburgh as they arrived like lighthouses with their sparkly eyes and stickers and bookmarks. They told me how their bookstores felt (which is what I asked about). I wrote in their books THE WILD IS INSIDE. I said out loud a hundred times: “this book is about a woman stranded by a tsunami who uncovers a man in the wreckage who emits a hum only she can hear.” I also said, in some version or another, this book is really about how we forget how to listen to ourselves because we have so many things in our hands. It’s very important that we remember how.
Melissa Albert is a (really!) lovely salt-of-the-earth writer who sat next to me at the signing. She had a lot of tote bags and likes to laugh and we are both obsessed with coffee. She showed me that we can be true and ourselves, even when there are a lot of people around we don’t know. She is a benevolent force. When I got home, I realized that I’ve been sleeping with her book, The Hazel Wood, next to me on my nightstand for several years. The old version of me had pinged me about Melissa a long time ago (because accordions of time).
On Friday night, after I flew home, I woke up after midnight in the dark. I sat straight up, and I knew. I knew something, remembered something, very clearly, and everything around me was organized. It felt benevolent. I couldn’t remember what it was in the morning. It’s been like this lately at night.
it’s very important we remember A gentleman from the Leviathan Bookstore came up to me in Pittsburgh. I stared at his name tag forever — because leviathans! — before handing him a book and a whale sticker I painted. I said: “Did you know this book is for leviathans?”
Because I was scared of everything, at one fleeting moment, I was deeply worried no one was going to line up for a book. I remembered about benevolent forces, though. That they arrive when we put everything down. Later, when so many booksellers did line up to take home a copy of Wild Beneath, they kept saying: “have you heard how Jamil is pitching your book?” Jamil Zaidi is a (very kind, big-hearted) rep for HarperCollins in the Pacific Northwest. Jamil was standing out there in the flow of hundreds of folks, talking about the wild, in an inside place that felt as big as an airplane hanger. I thanked him with my heart after.
Heart thank you’s. I think we should always be saying them, even when our oranges spill all over the parking lot.
It’s very important we remember. Trust the people who are for us will show up when we show up. Even when we are so scared. Sit with nothing happening at all. Put all the things down.
Look for benevolent forces, because they are everywhere.
love,
kelly
LEVIATHANS!
"Look for the benevolent forces-- they are everywhere" YESSSSSSS. So much love and support here with us, for us-- in little tiny spaces of our days. I just ordered your book and cannot wait to read it later this summer, xo.