Happy New Year in the Gregorian Calendar, wonderful people.
May you be blessed with alive love, blissful beauty, truthful lessons, and deep health this year.
I am writing you from our new penthouse apartment in a small beachtown in Portugal. We took the leap: For the next year we are exploring where this life of ours as a family will take us.
There is a lot that I am integrating right now, there is a lot I am allowing myself to feel, and there is a lot of just being in the moment to regulate our family of 5 into a new daily life. We made a few big changes in the way the boys will experiene their daily lives, which I am excited to share once we’ve been doing them for a few weeks.
So for the first essay of the year, I want to gift you my favorite journaling moments from 4 days in the car driving across Europe.
_________________________________________________
Dec 27th. Day 1.
The surrender of travel softens our edges. It’s like you trust God, her, to keep you nested in the hands of her unwavering promise that you’re already home.
Listen to the in between the line wisdom of your father’s voice coming through so lightly and almost jokingly. The lightness is the heaviness and pain he once turned into a lesson. It’s the elder‘s nourishing voice that makes our younger bodies feel like we can rest. And that everything will be ok. Find the elder. Seek the elder. Become the elder.
The greatest liberation is when we realize that our greatest fear lies in the expansion of our selves and our lives. Physically, we have to fall in love with the expansion of our edges to truly understand our capacity for growth. Too often we mistakenly perceive anxiety as the reason not to do something, when what the body is really signaling is a release of an old gestalt that has been tight and stiff for a long time and that is ready to be shed. Small moments of death like this are deeply uncomfortable and remind us that nature‘s cycles are also ours.
Dec 28th. Day 2.
Slow travel is unique in that it’s one of the lost arts of adjusting your breath, heart, mind, and feet to the evolving landscape, the change in nature, the subtle changes in cultural habits, the different weather patterns. It reminds you of the vastness and yet interconnectivity of our global village. It reminds you that subtle differences can be felt. Taking this van across Europe, passing through four countries shows me once again that with the speed of travel we often miss out on checking in with the pulse of the earth. Planes allow us to be dragged and dropped in any place without ever needing to adjust our own gestalt.
There is something so magical about slow traveling and seeing all the beautiful pockets of our world through that little window of your car: the seemingly random little lakes, the old towns hidden in valleys remaining unseen for most, the little night bar serving the local wine, sunsets that line the horizon that your are driving towards to just to show you the endless beauty that’s coming after, local children playing soccer and letting your kid join in. Slow travel is unique in that it’s one of the lost arts of adjusting your breath, heart, mind, and feet to the evolving landscape, the change in nature, the subtle changes in cultural habits, the different weather patterns. It reminds you of the vastness and yet interconnectivity of our global village. It reminds you that subtle differences can be felt.
Dec. 29th. Day 3.
As we move through life we will have to learn the important and graceful felt distinction between desire and expectation.
And: when does desire hide behind expectation?
Desire feels like suggestion, wisdom, and emerging knowing.
Expectation feels like narratives, programmed reaction, and standardized humanity. While it helps the transactional elements of life, it often misses nuance, willingness to listen, and openness to go deep.
And sometimes it’s the hurt part of unmet desire. It’s like our bodies cope by keeping our desires at bay and distance by raising our expectations for everyone around us including ourselves.
It feels like this felt reflection isn’t final yet, but it’s what’s available to me in this moment 🌱. So many chapters to author by living and experiencing them right now. Reflection really is real-time autobiography.
Dec 30th. Day 4.
How do we love ourselves in the middle of big changes, great ambiguity, less capacity than usual?
How do we love others in the middle of big changes, great ambiguity, less capacity than usual?
How do we lead in the middle of big changes, great ambiguity, less capacity than usual?
Faith.Vision.
Discipline.
Throughout the highs and lows of life those three things have always provided stamina.
But not the kind that is hard, stiff, and feel like efforting. More like the kind that paves a path in front of your inner eye, one that feels like god’s invisible hand is holding you even if you don’t allow it always. It’s a path that shows up because you still have places to go in your body - accessing a higher frequency, reminding yourself of deeper breaths, empowering yourself through a fast heartbeat, moving into the neutrality of your steady feet, feeling into the edges of your skin and how far you can move beyond it without loosing yourself, holding your lower back and reminding yourself where you come from and the life templates you can access.
Accessing, understanding, and connecting with the depth of our inner landscapes provides us with possibility and new capacity. That is faith, vision, and discipline.
Traveling reminds me of that, while it also throws me into areas of my inner landscape that need my attention.
Faith supports me in knowing that I can access all of the above. Belief feels like salutogenesis, like self-healing, like growth and evolution. Doubt feels like pathology, like I need fixing, like something is wrong.
Vision supports me in seeing what others can’t see yet and provides me with the trust that anything I can feel, dream, and see on the horizon is possible. It’s already mine. I just have to go and believe.
Discipline reminds me that free will is best used in repetition building out mastery and excellence. It reminds me that life’s sophistication is often found in the simplicity of doing it again and again and getting better at it every time.
It reminds me of the quote that I am about to ink onto my forearm:
“Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train” - Morihei Ueshiba
And here is a special one from my husband. He dictated it to me as he was driving us across the country on Dec 30th. It came out of a conversation we had in the car about how we can surrender to the inherent trust we have in each other’s growth:
One special thing about marrying someone who is always growing is that you get to fall in love with a new version of them every single day. Since there is always mystery and novelty in the essence of them always simply being themselves… there is always desire.
This type of marriage has the thrill of a never ending trust fall because as you exercise your commitment to seeing and understanding your partner they infinitely unfold.
You have to trust and believe that they are doing the same. And you have to love yourself enough to have confidence that they will fall in love with you in every day of your own unfolding just the same way.
Something that’s revealing itself about the adventure year even in these early days of the car ride is the true meaning of the word adventure.
Adventure is not just a glorious galavanting heroes journey away from responsibility. True adventure is a multifaceted and ambitious stumbling act through unpredictable territory. Not just new external environments but also many trip wires and insecurities of our interiority. And we’ve learnt to deathly avoid it in our comfortable daily routines.
Arguments and emotional breakdowns/turbulence in a dynamic family unit are not to be judged as predictively negative traits.
But instead embraced as gifts of inevitable growth and shedding and understanding.
Point of family is not peace, but growth.
______________________________________________________
Excited for another year together of unpacking leadership in life, love, and business.
All the love,
Franzi