Back barely eighteen hours from a short time with my kids in the US, I am a bit of a mess.

To my credit, should I need any, this was the first time in two years that my three children and I have been in the same room. That part only lasted about fifteen hours minus the time we were asleep, some of us with jetlag. Think Super Concentrate. And then, then, it was the first time in all of my life and all of their lives and all of my cells’ lives that we were all together with Baby Girl.

Baby Girl who officially arrived four and a half months ago but really secured her spot in my heart about seven months before. I am not going to say more about her right now because I still don’t have the right words but yes, it was the first time that we were all together.

I got to see my son be a dad, my son be an uncle - possibly surprised at how touched he was by this little bundle of magic who shares his DNA - and my daughter be an aunt. Tatie Titi.

Of course, I am aware of how usual this is, how common. How boring it might be for you to read about it.

That’s ok. I’m still going to write because good god, I need to.

I was there for about eight days, with various assortments of where to sleep that night, who is on their way to the airport, from the airport, to the airport again because flights are finicky, what are we going to eat, how do we all fit in the car, how is everybody doing.

I left my house on foot, my rubber boots through the mud and heat, and the humidity of the jungle, and made my way to the bus. Hours later, I got off a plane in a place that feels like another planet - with the beginning of a cold. A most inconvenient, ill-timed cold. I knew that no way was I going to want to hold Baby Girl, no matter how many weeks I had been waiting to do just that. My friend called it a god joke.

When it was gently, kindly announced to me four days later that I had gifted her her first cold, I sobbed in a way I still don’t quite understand. My daughter held me tenderly and my son joked that I would surely not be this upset had I given him a cold. I tried to explain and gave up. It was a big, funny, tragic, and delightfully messy family moment. We only had a few hours together and we were apparently going to give it all we had. I was then told that the good news was that hey, now I could hold her! I don’t know how many times I whispered to her that I was sorry. She made it through her first cold very gracefully, seemingly aware of just what her body needed: lots of sleep. She smiled the whole darn time, too.

Then her parents caught it.

All of us together. Something I used to take for granted. Something that now requires hours of planning, travel, and willpower. Something that’s one of the highest priorities of my current life. A short time to learn what the phone calls have left out, to remember the body language, the across-the-room inside jokes. To remember the us that was, and discover the us that is.

My kids and I, we’re all different and our different sometimes works and sometimes irks.
We have years of common history, and we don’t always agree on where it was and who was there, and what really happened.

And then this thing. This thing that makes it so that no matter the different, no matter the irks and the colds and the well… yes, the different, something in me, when I am with my kids, just IS. Something in me purrs in the background, a continuous note that does not stop while I sleep.

It’s probably the cells.

We arrived separately, we left separately, miles and miles and miles between us again.

Yesterday, I walked out of the last plane, got on a bus, and then began the trip on foot towards my house. Mud, heat, humidity.

My home, my furry girls, a week’s worth of growth bringing the grass to new heights.
I felt weird, tired, confused. Unsure.

I often think that our minds and hearts can’t move as fast as planes and that it takes longer to truly land.

I also know that I ate a huge dish in the last few days and that it will take me a while to digest it. I am aware of some brand of calm I feel when I am away from my Mexican life and of how quickly it goes away when I return. In its place, an intensity, a rawness, an aliveness. Another form of belonging.

I wonder: why am I living here, so far away from anyone who shares my cells? Is it enough to love where I live, to resonate so deeply with a place, when that place is on the other side of a border from my family? I scan my mind for the compromise, the solution, the yes. I even question the sanity of living this deep into nature. Should I move back to the village? All I find is exhaustion and a clear knowing that for tonight at least, the most important thing is to let my mind rest, to get into bed, and give it all to the pillow, “consultar con la almohada,” as we say here.

So that’s what I do, even though it is still light out, even though the full moon is on her way. The full moon in Capricorn, my full moon. May she organize me while I sleep, I need to close my eyes, to shut my mind.

The pups and I walk to the bedroom, I lift the pink sheets, ready to turn everything off except for the ceiling fan, and right there in front of me, at the exact spot where I so very much need to rest, brown on pink, flesh on fabric, is a scorpion.

On the phone with my son, we talk about our days, our lives.

He lives in Hawaii and I live in Mexico. He spends most of his awake time on the water and I spend some time each day looking at the same ocean, far far away.

Each day I want to go into the ocean, I really want to go in, but I rarely do. Because where I live the water is rough and also, mostly, because I am scared. Scared of how big this water is, how deep it is, how fast it moves, and also scared of All The Stuff That Lives in It.

When I was a baby, I met the Mediterranean Sea.

I think that at seven months of age, as I was first lowered into her wet and welcoming body, I built a strong silent bond with her, and from then on, immersing myself in the Med has always felt to me like going back into the womb. I know her smell, her salt, her sound. Day and night. When I visited her, after an almost 20-year absence, I sobbed hard and from the depth of my soul. I sobbed grief unsobbed, goodbyes unsaid, hurts unscreamed and I sobbed of love. I was home, floating in her amniotic fluid and knowing that nothing, absolutely nothing could ever hurt me while I was in her embrace.

It makes no sense, I know.

All kinds of things can happen in the Mediterranean Sea - and have - but while my mind knows this, my cells refuse to hear it. Lately, I have been craving her.

The Pacific Ocean… a very different thing.

I have spent years and years living close to it, be it in Hawaii, in Washington State, or in Mexico. I love it, I admire it, I respect it. I have sat by its edge and watched the sun disappear over and over again. Most days my feet walk in its foam and the movement of its shore. It is a part of my life. But it is not part of my DNA and maybe because of this, my conversation with it is different.

Back to my son, who loves any body of water and wants to get as close as he can to it, and as close as he can to its inhabitants.

A few months ago, he had told me about how, as a part of his job, he had been swimming with sharks. I had heard it when he had said it.

Then a couple of weeks ago, he sent me a video of him swimming with … oh I don’t know… maybe 30 sharks?

It was a beautiful video. Crystal blue water, silence, and all these huge sea animals swimming around slowly, all these huge sea animals - very much looking like sharks - swimming around … my son.

I called him.

“What the heck is going on in this video?” I demanded to know.

“What do you mean?” he responded.

“What are you doing in this video and who are you doing it with? These look like sharks.”

“Mom. I told you months ago. I swim with sharks. You don’t remember me telling you this?”

He was talking a little slowly. In fact, he sounded a tad worried. I think since I passed the 55-year mark, he might have started to look for signs of me forgetting things.

I think back.

Yes, I do remember him saying this, I do.

BUT I suddenly also remember - and this is where things get weird - the physical feeling of immediately rejecting the reality of what he had told me. I remember him saying it and me instantly translating it in my brain, the way I may translate an easy English word into Spanish.

He had said “sharks” and I had translated it to “cute-sea-animals-who-go-by-the-name-of-sharks-but-are-a-totally-different-thing-and-would-never-hurt-my-baby.”

He waited for me to tell him that yes, I did remember. It would have been easier to tell him that I had forgotten than to tell him about how I had immediately put on a thick suit of denial. To make him think that my mind was slipping instead of the truth which - as a friend wrote a few days ago - I had gas-lit myself.

Which I had been able to do comfortably, until the elegant, terrifying video showed up on my phone, leaving no doubt as to what was going on, what had been going on, and what I had zero power to stop.

My son regularly swims with sharks and loves it.

“But babe?” I tried. “Isn’t this dangerous?” Just as I said it I knew how it sounded.

“Not if you know what you’re doing, not if you can read them,” was his answer.

Steve Irwin’s name flashed through my mind, came in through the left side of my head, and exited on the right side, leaving a searing sea-scented scar in between.

Parenting.
Zero control.
Heart walking outside of our bodies.

I know how it works. I have decades of experience.

Maybe my funny inner translator knows too and so tried to give me a break, not bother me with things I can’t change, and let me sleep at night. It gave me something to hang on to, a grown-up Santa of sorts: Those Cute Little Sharks Who Would Never Harm Anyone.

As our hearts get tangled with other hearts through the course of our lives, which is one of the main points of having a heart, we have the option to protect our vulnerability, to not let fear whisper in our ears, and to pretend that something easier is happening.

We also have the option to not only accept each other’s choices but to celebrate them, even if they scare the beejeebees out of us.

The first option is easiest, but the second option is where intimacy lives, where we really get to see someone else, to know them.

My son swims with sharks. I now choose to celebrate this, his love of it, his passion that I do not share and that scares me. I choose to celebrate him.

And I still miss the Med.

A year ago, I made a heartfelt and soul-felt request to Life.

I said: I want to write and I want to paint.

Which really wasn’t that big of a declaration to anyone who knows me because I have been doing both for a heck of a long time.

But Life and I, we have a long history and It knew very well what I meant. I meant: I want to uplevel. I want to bring my art and my writing to the front. I want to do more of both than of the coaching which I still love and hope to continue to do forever. Please?

And because I trust in the African proverb “Pray While You Move Your Feet,” having done the praying, I went about the business of moving my feet.

I turned my small guest room into an art studio, arranged my paints all in a pretty row, and placed my brushes in glass jars. I ordered some canvases and I gently touched the arm of a project that had been sleeping for two years, whispering for it to wake up.

People. Painting people. Specifically, the people of the village where I live.

While I have been painting Hearts since the first days of the pandemic as if my sanity depended on it (which I think, it did) I had never painted people. I did not think I could, actually.

And then one day in June about three years ago, picking up a bunch of little wooden frames on which to paint Hearts, I got so enamored with the woodshop and the people who worked there, with its leaky tin roof under the torrential rain that well… I don’t know, “something” made me take a quick photo. Then go home in the rain, dry myself, and somehow paint the guys in the woodshop.

I had never done this. And I loved the way it looked.

A few weeks later, feeling encouraged, I painted the portrait of a friend of mine as she delivered her fresh produce. This one too, I loved.

I photographed a couple more people from the village and the seed of An Idea was planted.
Then life took a few left turns, The Idea settled in for a long siesta and it wasn’t until June of last year that I asked it to wake up.

I made my request to Life and The Idea rubbed its eyes, stretched its little arms towards the sky, and said good morning.

In this new space, with all my colors lined up in front of me, I got inspired to create twelve paintings of The People of the Village. La Gente Del Pueblo. Then eventually to have a little gathering to share the portraits with the community. I wanted to show people how beautiful they are as they go about their daily lives, I wanted to honor them and celebrate them.

I had the whole summer in front of me and while creating twelve portraits felt ambitious, I knew I could do it.

So I started. I did one, then two. Then three. Every time I finished one, I posted it on the local FB pages and was delighted at how people loved it.

Then one day I received a message from a man who owns a restaurant in town, a man of many ideas. He asked me to meet him.

At the meeting, drinking some delicious passion fruit water, he told me how excited he was about my work and told me that he had an idea. Did I want to hear it?

I wanted to hear it.

The details don’t matter much - and did not come to fruition - but they involved me creating more portraits than the twelve I had stretched to commit to. They involved me creating… fifty-four paintings! When I heard this, I took a breath as I could feel Life watching. I could not just say no, I could not ask “Are you crazy??”

So I did a quick calculation in my mind and said: “Ok, I can do this. I just need about one year to create this body of work.” One portrait a week… sure.

We shook on it and Lila and I made a beeline for the beach. This is where I run to when I need more space in my mind and less space between me and my intuition.

We walked, I felt, I tried to stay away from words. Just feel.

Then I saw it. The silliness of it. The silliness of me asking Life to become an artist, a real, paid, recognized artist - and soon. And then when the invitation envelope shows up at my door, less than a month later, my answer is: ”Oh yes, that’s nice. Give me a year or so.” It almost made me laugh.

I went home and sent a message giving my commitment. Fifty-four portraits by November 1st. It was August. I had given my word and I would do it.

Of course, I did it.

It wasn’t even stressful. It was focused, it was a task, it was a blessing.

On December 7, with the help of my friends, I held a beautiful community show celebrating and honoring fifty-four People of the Village. It was packed, there was music, and there was a lot of love. It would be another two months before I let myself feel the bigness of it all.

Twelve paintings felt like a stretch. Yet, fifty-four was simply a commitment, a focus, a YES.

It was a respectful response to what Life was offering me, having heard my request.

A year later, most of my working hours are spent painting and writing, while I am still loving getting on a call for a coaching session. The proportions have been reversed, just like I asked them to be. I am in awe.

And because I know that you and I have many things in common, today, I invite you to:
1) get clear on what you want
2) speak/write/sing/cry your request and here’s the big one:
3) when it shows up, reach out to meet it.

Chances are you will not tear, just a lovely, beautiful stretch that will remind you how delicious your life can be.