I hope this email...

Yesterday, on Christmas Eve, my friend Flash sent an email to our farm family that sparked my heart. It was the exact email I am keen to receive on a holiday, a day when I can break free from my inbox because of the rare state/religious-sanctioned pause in our society’s perpetual “on”-ness. No one is expecting me. But what arrives to me with love is welcome, on any day, on all holy days. The content of this email is stunning, but the energy and intention behind it is what inspired my email to you today, down below.

~~~

Family,

I hope this email finds you well.

As I weave words on this blank canvas and watch the white screen crack in crisp little lines with the black of letters, I hope you feel the soft ease in my heart flowing to you like a prayer, the way my grandmother's embroidery needle sailed across her fabric canvas with dexterity and grace. Flicked wrists, nimble fingertips, what we touch shows us the life we're living. What are you touching right now? Notice what you touch today.

I hope you feel the rhythm of rainfall tapping on the skylight in my kitchen, and... just now, somehow sensed the way I trailed off as I wandered into a daydream. Pondering how each and every microscopic droplet of water can only become rain if it clings to the tiniest of dust particles drifting in our atmosphere. Magnetizing more particles, they become heavy enough to lose their ability to float on the edges of our planet. Gravity begs the weighted things back down to Earth. These droplets run rivers thousands of feet above us, colliding and merging and growing exponentially in seconds. They become giant unto themselves, only to land miniature among new giants, only to roll and pool and seep into mighty rivers again and grow back into giants exponentially in seconds. I am entranced.

...

I'm back again. Hello. I hope you know that hot coffee steams beside me in a mug made by my favorite earth shaper, Alex Barao. Shiny glaze and ashy grit, I feel I'm drinking from a meteor every morning. And in some ways I am. And in everything I find a connection to the cosmos. Even this tap tap tap on my laptop is tapping into stardust somehow. Lead and Copper and Cadmium and Manganese and Gold and Aluminum. A minimum of 66 minerals make up a computer. Excavated from the ancients, shaped into its own kind of meteor, allowing me to beam signals across spacetime to find you in orbit too. Where are you right now? Notice where you go today.

I hope this email fills your well. I hope you feel my presence, honoring you, recognizing that precious synapses are firing in your brain as these words meet your eyes or ears and digest through the miraculous mechanisms of your mind. I hope you feel the seriousness with which my care yearns to be communicated. I hope you feel your humanity witnessed in this digital realm that can so often deprive you of just that. That flattens and mechanizes you into a program. Programmed by software that plays on your neurochemicals and says you don't have or are not enough. No. You are the sacred alchemy of stardust and water, the simplicity and the majesty coexisting to birth life over and over again inside and around you forever.

I want to be a system glitch.

I hope, in those contexts that are so hostile to our humanity, that we write emails that insist upon and demand otherwise – that serve as infinite, tiny disruptors to all that seeks to suppress us. I hope we write emails that don't select Google's pre-meditated formulas or regurgitate autopilot aphorisms and assumptions. I hope we write emails that serve as micro revolutions. I hope we write emails that reflect us when we're in our ease, our rest, our trust, our surrender, our remembrance that no email deserves to disturb our divinity. I hope this email is a system soother, a nervous system settler, a deep breath. Where is your breath?

I was holding mine. In... out... that's better.

I hope this email casts a spell. I hope you know that this morning I sat at the foot of our elders, the redwood grove up the road, under the biggest tree in the fairy ring whose strong limbs kept me dry in the downpour. I hope you know that this morning I danced to one of my favorite songs, Ben Howard's Depth Over Distance, and thought about our roots binding us to the ground, our trees reaching tall in the woods, and I felt grateful to be contained in the Earth's tender grasp that tugs me and you and raindrops and redwoods so snugly, so securely, asking us to sink into her medicine, asking us to compost all that needs to go, and fuel ourselves with all that yearns to grow. I hope this email enchants you and sparks the stories in your soul with reverence and resonance, and if so, I would love to hear even a glimmer of them down below.

I hope this email sends you off into your day or night with delight.

May I honor your multitudes and say that I know your prismatic magnitude is worthy of being seen in all its dimensions. May we find each other again in the flow of the rivers, the sweet rivers of life. The rivers above and below and all around us.

With love,

Rachel

~and if you feel so moved, you are invited to share this prayer with someone you love