Building my Heart a Home

Cancer // Leo // Virgo

Greetings! It feels like it’s been ages. How are you?? So many things have happened, but the summer tidal wave swept me out to sea and I was stuck on a desert island of sunscreen and late nights and beach days. Now I’m one week into our new fall/school schedule, but I wanted to send out some love from my corner of the world. I hope your end of summer is bringing you lots of joy and surprise and connection. xo Lins

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End of summer is one of my favorite seasons of the year. It fills me with such tenderness. Like the overgrown garden, my heart feels full to bursting.

But I also feel ready for the cool mornings of autumn and the long sleep of winter, even as I feel nostalgic for the dog-days full of sunshine and popsicles and fireflies. The song of the cicadas fills me with incredible joy and I’ve looked forward to their monosyllabic singing. These little creatures who spend so much of their life sleeping underground, and emerge for what seems a blink of an eye to molt, and sing, and reproduce. But aren’t we all so harmless and fleeting? Don’t we all just want to find a mate and sing our song and imagine that life won’t end in a blink?

Things that are keeping me tender: buying school supplies with a teenager who is just about to start high school. Visiting my grandpa in hospice. Watching my tween learn how to overcome anxiety to do the thing she loves most in the world. Beloved friends and caring adults who help parent my kids. Fireworks with childhood friends. S’mores and ice cream every other night. Firefly-catching competitions. Weddings. Sunsets. Lakes and cornfields and sycamore trees and sunflowers.

My pride & joy!

My heart just keeps growing to take it all in.

Which is one of the biggest lessons of this season. The summer season holds the energy of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo. We just wrapped up Leo season which corresponds to the Strength card. This is the card of the Lion-hearted. Or what I associate with the Vast Heart. A heart that can hold it all - the most beautiful moments and the moments of despair. The relief and devastation¹. The wedding of two dear friends on the same weekend my grandpa gets moved to hospice. Remembering the birth of my firstborn, while preparing for their first year of high school. Driving to get school supplies and passing a group with protest signs because Gaza is still being devastated. Still.

The Strength card supports me in trying to hold it all. It tells me I am strong when I open my wild heart. And it is wild in there - glimmers of hope alongside blinding rage alongside heartbreak and regret and fear. It asks: Where are you feeling called to be courageous? Can you soften to what is and allow the vastness to hold you?

Look up!

The summer began with Cancer season, the season of the crab - a being who carries its home on its back - who taught me how to build practices that bring me home to myself. Writing² is one of those practices, even when I don’t feel like I have the time to do it. Meditation is another. Painting another. What are the rituals or small joys that bring you back yourself? And how can you practice - like a charioteer - letting those steadying forces keep you on the path?

A mid-summer altar, and ode to the beach.

Unrestrained Summer Fun

Want to know one of the practices I worked on most over the summer? Disconnecting from catastrophe and connecting to joy. “The world is always ending, and always being rebuilt³.” I can choose which I want to focus on and which I want to inform how I love my people and community.

I built in very steady habits this summer to support my overwhelmed nervous system, but now our schedules are upended again with the start of school. And because I haven’t written about it here before, I’ll let you know that I am starting massage therapy school this week as my kids start school! Woohoo! I had plans to write about the decision, but then the summer disappeared and now I’ve started and the wheel just keeps turning. So friends, I’m back in school and I’m not sure what that is going to do to my writing habits, but I do know that it is an exciting new adventure and it has really fun implications for the next season of my life. I’ll be sure to check in from time to time, promise.

A virgo goes back to school…

Speaking of the wheel turning, I turn 38 this week! I mean, what? I’m in class with students who are only a few years older than my oldest child. What is this wonderful, confounding thing called Time?

Each birthday I fall more in love with growing old and this year is no exception. Bless the grey hairs! Bless the bits of wisdom! Bless the depth of knowledge & relationships! Bless the stability in my own inner knowing! Bless, bless, bless.

It’s Virgo season⁴ and I’m walking down the dark path with my arm outstretched, the soft glow of my lantern lighting the way. I grow older and each year I build a new wall or room or window on the home of my heart. I’m taking all my tools with me into this new season - tarot, good books, good people, meditation, art-making - and I hope that you find ways to resource yourself through whatever the end of this wild year holds. Rooting for you. Rooting for us.

1.

Courtney Martin

wrote heartbreakingly about mid-life and all it holds. She (and her daughter) gave me the new word: Revastated.

2.

Amanda B. Hinton

wrote so beautifully the other day about writing as a steady home in election chaos. It spoke straight to my heart.

3.

D.L. Mayfield

said this in an instagram reel that I have rewatched multiple times this summer. I was raised to think that the world was going to hell, and I don’t have to view the world (the achingly beautiful world) that way anymore.

d_l_mayfield

A post shared by @d_l_mayfield

4. Last year I wrote about Virgo season, the Hermit card (love!), and it still feels relevant to this back-to-school season: Hobbling, but Make it Creative