The Things I Am Carrying Out of Eclipse Season

There is a particular quiet that arrives at the end of an eclipse season. The sky settles. The house goes still. And somewhere in the settling, you notice that you are not the same woman who walked in.

This one carried a birthday inside it. Forty-two. I spent the morning the way I want to spend all of them now, slowly, with warm tea going cold in my hands, my daughter's feet resting against my leg, a loom already going somewhere down the lane. No countdown. Nothing to prove. Just the particular gratitude of a woman who has finally stopped rushing toward her own life.

These are the things I am carrying out of this season, and out of these years. Not advice, exactly. More like the things I would whisper to the woman I used to be, the one who thought she had to earn her own rest.

Relationships are the flowers of a life

For a long time I believed the work was the point, and the people were simply what happened around it. I had it backwards. The people are the point. The work is what happens around them.

Family. Friends. The women who sew beside me, whose children finish their homework while the machines hum. These are the flowers of a life. Everything else, the numbers, the launches, the plans, is just weather moving over the garden. Tend the flowers. The weather will do what it does.

Choose joy over being good

I was raised to be good. Many of us were. To be good is to keep yourself small enough to be approved of, and I wore that smallness for years without ever feeling its weight.

Joy is a different thing. Joy rarely stops to ask whether you are behaving. And here is what I have found, quietly, again and again: when you follow the joy, the good arrives on its own. It always does. Goodness was never the thing to chase. It is what grows in the ground where joy has already been.

Learn your body as it changes

A woman's body is not a man's, and I learned this the slow way, the way that asks you to pay first and understand later.

So much of what we are handed in the name of wellness was built for a different nervous system. The ice baths. The long fasts. The cold green smoothies before the sun is properly up. My body did not want to be shocked into health. It wanted to be nourished into it. Warm breakfast. Warm lunch. Warm dinner. A warm body makes a grateful heart. Learn yours as it changes. Do your own reading, and ask better questions than the ones the noise hands you.

Everything moves in cycles

Everything moves in cycles, like clockwork. The moon knows this. The tide knows this. A business knows it too, though we like to pretend otherwise.

A year that is booming will have its winter, and the winter can last longer than a single season. So I have learned to prepare in the spring. To simplify. To build a life that does not need the boom in order to feel like enough.

This is not scarcity. It is the opposite of it. It is knowing that the ground beneath you was never the number.

The universe is mostly empty space

The universe is almost entirely empty space. Nearly all of it. And she is not anxious about it. She does not rush to fill herself.

We were not made to consume without ceasing, the feed, the things, the small noise that arrives the moment we are still. Look up from it. The abundant world is already here, in front of you, in the light coming through the window and the person sitting across the table. You do not have to keep consuming in order to feel full. You were full long before any of it arrived.

Healing cannot be rushed

Some healing cannot be hurried, no matter how ready you feel to be finished with it. Becoming a mother rearranged me in ways I am still tending, years on.

So I stay with it. I move my body. I check my blood. I keep the promise to look after the woman who does all the looking after. This is not indulgence. It is the quiet maintenance of a life you intend to live all the way through. Slow, like everything worth keeping.

How you dress is a way of tending yourself

I make clothing for a living, so believe me when I tell you this is not about vanity. How you dress is one of the quietest ways you tell your body it is safe. Cared for. Home.

I stopped wearing anything that asked me to hold my breath. The stiff things. The things cut for the woman I was performing instead of the one I actually am. Now I reach for what moves the way I want to move through my days, slowly, softly, as though it has somewhere gentle to be. Clothing made in ceremony, by hands that were paid and thanked, for a body that has carried you this far. That is not a small thing to put on in the morning.

With love from Bali,
Myrah