The Blessing and the Curse of “The Extraordinary”

What’s your relationship with the word “extraordinary”?

Whenever I’m feeling healthy and whole and fully sovereign in myself I would tell you that I wish to live an “extraordinary” life. 

Even in the midst of this terrible disrupted year when all we seem to have is the at-home routine, I believe I have still sought - and experienced - the extraordinary.

Does that sound like some kind of crazy humble brag? Let me tell you the story of what it took to embody and compassionately redefine the word and make “the extraordinary” into something that belongs in the everyday.

Expanding the Extraordinary In these Extra/Ordinary Times

When you look up “extraordinary” with our friends at Merriam Webster, they offer “going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary.”

This definition seems to explain a Valentine’s Day trip to Paris, graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League school, or having quintuplets. It also can include pulling over the car to take in a particularly stunning sunset, leaving a love note in your beloved’s pocket on an average Tuesday, or taking time to ask neighbors if they need anything from the store when you make a run into town.

With this expanded definition, there are a hundred opportunities a day to go beyond the typical, even in an era when most of life is lived with a few miles of home. 

At this moment, I’m deeply grateful I’ve landed at an understanding of extraordinary that is at once more expansive and terrifically small. If I had been striving for an extraordinary life when I was twenty-one in the midst of Covid circumstances, I would have given up long ago.

“Someday, we’re going to be extraordinary.” 

In the spring of 2001, my college roommate directed Wendy Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others. The show was brilliant. To watch it in my last few weeks as an undergrad, full of all the fears of what the “real world” would bring was ridiculously (and understandably) emotional.

And, as we tend to do when absorbing good art (especially while ridiculously emotional), I pulled the show through my own prism and refracted it so it spoke directly to me.

I can still see the blond pixie girl put her arm around another actor at the end of the final act and proclaim “someday, we will be extraordinary!”

At twenty-one when the world was still wrapped in its pre-9/11 blanket, the greater part of me was all full of hope. We all had our entire rich, as-yet-to-be-written lives ahead of us. I was all about committing to this horizon reach to the extraordinary.

A hard-to-ignore part of me was also full of regret (and also the bagels and beer that had a gluten-intolerant me feeling bloody awful most of the time). Though I’d spent most of high school on the stage, I’d said goodbye to performing just as I’d said goodbye to writing fiction when I entered college. I had resigned myself to reading and commenting on other people’s words, watching other people’s plays, longing after other women’s boyfriends, and feeling generally uncomfortable in my own skin.

I had achieved so much in my four years, but I was still assigning the real goal, the extraordinary self who lived a life of passion and creativity, to that blessed someday.

The Long Dance With the (Extra)Ordinary

I held on to this line for most of the next two decades, constantly measuring whether I had achieved the almighty “extraordinary.” 

In 2008 I wrote a blog post about my quest for the “extraordinary” how I finally made some peace with that. (Eating like a grown up and no longer longing for a lover surely helped all that.)

And yet, it was still a “middle of the journey” moment. When I wrote that post at age 28, I joked about how I would be happy with myself even if I did not have my name on the spine of a book by the time I was 30. (The subtext, of course, was that I was kidding/not kidding. Without that wunderkind book on the shelf, I could be happy, but I was also aware I was not quite living up to extraordinary.)

Due to New Information, the Author Has Compelled to Alter the Story

When I started researching that book of mine that would come out earlier in 2020, right smack in the middle of my fortieth year, I finally got my hands on Wasserman’s play. The part I mis-remembered for all those years is in the very last line. Rita speaks: 

Timmy says when I get my head together, and if he gets the stocks, I’ll be able to do a little writing. I think if I make it to forty I can be pretty amazing. Holly, when we’re forty we can be pretty amazing. You too Muffy and Samantha, when we’re… forty-five we can be pretty fucking amazing.

Wait, what? I had spent all this time forcing myself to be extraordinary when all I had to do was be amazing?

And I hadn’t even remembered what would make the characters so amazing (or extraordinary): all they had to do was write. And make it to forty. 

Turns out, I nailed it. I even have four more years to land at the ultimate “pretty fucking amazing.”

And you know what that is? Extraordinary.

Extraordinary, Amazing, Magical, Sovereign, and the Power to Re-Define and Embody Those Words As We Go

Here we are in an extraordinary year that is anything but amazing (most of the time). In spite of it all, we are constantly surrounded by chances to stand sovereign in our own choices and to call in our own kind of magic when the usual ways of the world are inaccessible. 

We’re called redefine the words and rewrite the story and re-member all the pieces of life in a new way.

If I could go back and speak to my 21 year-old self about what a beautiful life might look like, I would leave extraordinary and amazing out of the conversation. Though I have come to love those words as I have lived them and re-defined them, there’s too much room for misinterpretation (and perfectionism and discontent).

Instead, I would tell me to go for magical and sovereign and trust all the rest to fall into place.

What is magic?

• Magic is having the power to seek and see wonder in the everyday.

• Magic is the ability to find hope in the shadows.

• Magic is realizing you've had the power to transform your world all along.

And what is sovereignty?

• To be sovereign in your own life is to have your feet lovingly rooted into the earth and your hair all spangled with stars as you love what is and reach for what is possible.

• To be sovereign is to know yourself and trust yourself in the midst of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

• To be sovereign is to know how to use your magic for your own highest good and for the good of all creation.

This December I have two ways for you to bring more Sovereignty and Magic into your life and redefine the way you use the words that shape your experience.

The #7MagicWords Challenge is our seasonal creativity project. This free week of prompts, community, and, of course, creative magic gives you a chance to play with and redefine the worlds that define your world.

A Sovereign Way 2021 is a half-day planning retreat for creative entrepreneurs and sovereign souls who want to envision and plan a year of personal and collective transformation.

Will you join me in the next adventure?

Lessons From a Morning After Moon

Before seven o’clock this morning I slipped out my front door. Even after twelve years in this house, I still marvel that we have a wraparound front porch and that it has a view of the mountains. 

The full moon was sinking into the clouds that clung to the western horizon. Naked branches held her for a moment before she slipped out of sight. I allowed myself the luxury of lingering, letting myself steep in the uncommon experience of taking in the miracle of the everyday. Mist rose from the boggy valley below and the neighborhood roosters vied to sing in the dawn. For once, I didn’t despise those lousy, endlessly noisy birds. 

All this silvery gray mystery and steely lavender glory… it was all playing out in my corner of the sky.

The house hummed behind me, a hive of early morning activity. At last, we’ve assumed the school day routine, even if it’s only two days per week.

In this stolen moment, I knew absolute joy, peace, and trust in my place in the world.

This is Sovereignty in action, this claiming of a few sacred moments with a cup of coffee and a quick conversation with the moon. 

This is where the quest for Sovereignty, for empowerment, for love, and for magic wants to lead. All the writing and the meditating, all the books and oracle readings, all the conversations and healing sessions with wise women and spirit guides. We walk this path and do this sacred work so we can be fully present for just a few minutes with the earth, with a poem, with a beloved’s laughter, with the feel of our own skin.

All the words I’ve worked and all the ways I’ve walked have led me to this Sovereign moment when I can be with the fullness of the moon and the fullness of a Tuesday morning and the fullness of this life.

When you can slow the pace and step out of ordinary time so you can be part of the greater sweep of time and space, you’re making room for the fundamental elements of creativity, contentment, and connection. 

We all need to wrap ourselves in a bit of dream and moonglow, but the imperfections of this moment are what makes this talk of Sovereignty and magic into something real. 

As lovely as this is, it really shouldn’t be sweater weather at dawn on December 1 in the Hudson Valley. My husband is heading off to work at a company that feels increasingly fragile, as does just about any manufacturing job right now. Though it feels wonderful to send the girls back to a classroom, the Covid numbers are rising and I know the cost of hybrid learning is that the teachers are doing twice as much and the students are learning half as much and no one really wins. 

I hold all these realities beside the reality of the breath in my lungs, the swirl of the clouds, and the recognition that all these worries are being held by something more.

These are the details of life, and though they’re essential, they’re momentary. The details will be different the next time I hold court with a morning-after-full moon. By late December, the snow might be falling, the holidays will pause whatever routine we’ve established, and we’ll all have new, as yet unimagined stories to tell.

Actually… I know what story I will be telling the morning after the next full moon, and I would love to have you there with me.

On Wednesday, December 30 at noon ET I’m leading a half-day workshop that will help you explore, embody, and describe the qualities you’d like to bring to the new year.

Join us for A Sovereign Way 2021.

The Myth of Creative Magic: Timeless Truths and Modern Lies

There’s a myth I constructed around myself. It’s personal and it’s isolating, but I don’t think I’m the only one who has inhabited a narrative like this.⁣⁣

In this story, untold creative, magical, sovereign potential is trapped within me. Like a maiden in a tower. Like a sword in a stone. Like a beauty in a beast.⁣⁣

If only, the story goes, if only I could scrabble together the time, the space, the strength, and the faith, then I could get free. Everything I am meant to conceive, craft, and share would burst forth for all to see.⁣

Someday, the myth declares, some blessed, sapphire sky day when all that art and alchemy would flow forth like droplets of goddess-spawn, pieces of art fully and perfectly formed. Finally, I would finally emerge as the mystical source I’d always known myself to be. I could thrive like I did before the curse was cast and the fabled inner spring was dammed.

But how?

Perhaps, I dreamed, I could learn some arcane emancipation spell or receive the blessing of a passing godmother on her way back to the enchanted wood. ⁣Freed like a springtime river after a long freeze, an unnameable magical force would enable me finally to express the pent up stories, power, and divine inspiration that’s been caught like a salmon trapped in a druid’s pool. ⁣

Once I possessed those magic words, I prayed, then I’d become at once creatrix and conduit. ⁣ ⁣

The myth I wove had me believing that if only I had the time, space, strength, fortune, and faith THEN I could effortlessly create something that could be held, loved, and learned from, here in our three dimensional world.⁣

Here’s the thing about myths…

If a myth is not empowering and inspiring, then you get to smash it and use the pieces to create something totally new.⁣

We can rewrite that myth of creative if onlys and somedays every time we close our eyes to dream or pick up a pen to write. You can cast a new, life-affirming myth every time you open your mouth to share what you know, what you’re learning, or what great wisdom you’ve just now channeled through.⁣

Too often, our creativity, magic, and sovereign potential get wrapped up in gossamer wishes that get hung on lucky stars, maybes, and the light of a certain phase of the moon. There’s so much limitation wrapped up in these stories of imprisonment, of waiting, of recovering some power that’s been too long buried away.

It doesn’t have to be this way…

Myths are tricky magic, of course. 

Myths have a way of reflecting our most troubling, complex needs. They also have  a way of inspiring us to undertake the quests we’re most afraid to accept.

As Karen Armstrong says in A Short History of Myth, “Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives—they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.”

Myth is part of our DNA, but these days we also use myth to connote the opposite of “fact.” In modern parlance, myth is often synonymous with “bullshit.”

So, let’s play with this story of limited creative power and possibility. What’s a timeless myth, an enduring truth out of time that reveals ancient wisdom and deepest universal desires, and what’s a modern myth, a made-up tale of personal limitation?

Someday mystical day, I’ll awake having the requisite time, space, strength, and faith to achieve my dreams… 

Oh look! A modern made-up myth concocted of a splash of “not enoughness,” a heaping dose of self pity, and a huge dash of inadequacy. There’s never going to be a particularly destined day when it all aligns and we have every super power in the cabinet, ready to be employed against the forces of evil and lack.

Where, then, is the timeless myth, the myth to live by? Simply snip away that “someday” and step into the divine reality:

At any moment, we can wake up to the truth that everything we ever need to create that next wonderful thing could all come together right… now. 

If only I were one of those lucky mortal beings chosen to be conduits of divine creativity. Then, I could tap into “the good stuff” any time I want.

Ah, another modern, made up myth of limitation crafted from a belief that we’re all part of a predestined plot contrived by an off-planet narrator.  

Is there a timeless myth, here? Something that might guide us through the next project and this momentous, evolutionary age? Of course. All of us have access to and are available to divine source.

The privileges of comfort and security can give us easier access to a creative life, but then the most awesome creations can arise from lack and adversity. The story is written breath by breath and moment by moment, and we are all invited to play and write and live our part, no matter our circumstances.

Freed from the somedays and the if onlys, there is just one myth that longs to be understood as enduring and true:

There’s a divine creative force within you,
within me,
within all of us.

It’s always within our power to
let it flow forth, freely expressed. 

Here, then, is the new myth that is older than fairytale, pantheons, and rhyme

We are at once princess, tower, and the knight who stages a rescue.  We are at once sword, stone, and the warrior who will wield it with righteous courage. We are at once beautiful, beastly, and the spark that transforms one into another.

We are made of the entire spectrum of generative magic that includes the growth of daffodil bulbs, the flight patterns of migrating geese, the swell of the tides, and warmth in a newborn’s fist.

So, as I look back on that myth of creativity that I used to tell, I commit to rewriting it every day and in every way that I can.

I will not wait, and neither will I force the moment. I will not get tangled up in the blue of longing, and neither will give up hope.

I will trust in divine timing. And that’s not about hanging it all on the next phase of the moon or holding on the line for the sybil’s next speech. It’s about recognizing that divinity and time are all part of the same sacred rhyme. 

What if you could truly believe it, too?

All timing is divine. In divinity, there is time.
All of us are chosen. Within all of us, there is the divine.
All of us are creative souls. Within all of us, there are the seeds of creation.

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Can I help guide you as you rewrite your own creative myths? The Story Illumination Sessions are for creatives, entrepreneurs, and writers who want to clear the blocks, transform imagination into reality, and make something magnificent.

Hope, Community, and Infinite Potential (Even in the Darkness)

We’re moving into the darkest part of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. How does this time feel for you?

What if it felt like a time to pause and look inward to uncover and explore the messages and stories that you need for the year ahead?

For those who look to the Celtic calendar, these weeks between Samhain (that’s the Irish for Halloween) and the Winter Solstice is like time out of time. It’s like a breath between the ending that comes with the final harvest at the end of October and the new year that begins when the days begin to lengthen again after the solstice.

In modern times, of course, it is hard to allow that kind of “time out,” especially with all the nonsense and chaos that we’ve been told should accompany the consumerist holidays. 

Over this weekend, however, I realized how many of us hunger for this kind of sacred, late autumn pause. 

Yesterday was a new moon. Every astrologer and spiritual teacher who speaks of the stars seemed to post something emphasizing the importance of this particular new moon in Scorpio. It is a moment of deep interiority and rebirth. (And don’t worry, even though the new moon was on November 15, you can still ride its tide for the next few days.) 

As so many offered insights into the particular power of this moon it was clear that there’s not only a desire to talk about these esoteric, “woo” ideas, but there’s also a deep need for such messages.

For many of us, this is not news. Right now, it feels like there’s a marked shift away from the fear conjured by dreadful headlines and “doom scrolling” as many people move toward self-discovery and spiritual awareness.

When we can use spiritual insight not to escape reality but to manage, heal, and expand it, then we’re doing the evolutionary work.  It’s what hope looks like. It's how we can heal and renew our society and our natural world.

Evolutionary Hope in Action

My eight week Stand In Your Sovereign Story program is wrapping up this week. 

As you might imagine, a course for creative entrepreneurs and transformation professionals brings together a group of like-souled storytellers. This particular group has a remarkable number of commonalities, especially when it comes to what they are called to do: gathering women together in spiritual, healing, and consciousness communities.

It would have been all too easy for the participants in this program to look around at one another and sigh, “There are so many people running women’s groups and talking about the moon! I’m too late to the party. I should look for another idea.”

That’s not what happened, however.

Instead, this group of Sovereign women who follow the cycles of the seasons and the moon, who consult oracle decks, and rely on their intuition rather than boilerplate business advice, saw something marvelous in one another:

Infinite potential

They recognized that what they had in common was a source of strength and proof. This desire to share spiritual practices and rituals is part of a greater movement toward creating supportive, soulful communities and rebuilding our battered world.

Rather than looking at the world of coaches, healers, and teachers and seeing competition, we’re invited to see companionship and confirmation. This work of the heart is real and valued and necessary. As more and more look for this kind of guidance and healing, more of us are called to do this work.

The group was bonded by a common goal: help people connect and become more healthy and whole. And then, as individuals, they looked what’s singular, unique, and “sovereign” about their own story, approach, and offer.

We are Sovereign souls.
And, we are part of a great, collective moment and movement.

This dual truth of Sovereignty is something we know in our core, but sometimes I think we need to be reminded.

This is a good time to recommit to this, and all kinds of sacred inner knowing. As one cycle of uncertainty ends and we pause before the next begins, it’s more important than ever to ground into the essential worth of this work of the soul. 

My Own Sovereign Work of the Soul

I’m feeling this time of introspective magic working on me, too. Stay tuned for some big, beautiful changes in the way I support your your quest for Sovereignty, creative alchemy, and storytelling as form of magic and medicine.

In the meantime, I would love help you navigate this dark in-between time and help you access you story and your creative magic. Book a Story Healing session.

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Over the next few months, I will be talking less about storytelling as a means to grow and market your business and more about magic, creativity, and spiritual sovereignty.

The Stand In Your Sovereign Story, my signature program for creative entrepreneurs will return next spring. Get on the interest list to get the best price and other updates.

A New Day. Our New Story.

Four years ago, those of us on the left began to tell a story of resistance. 

We were angry and inspired. 

Inspired by General Leia and the rebels, inspired by countless warrior queens and goddesses from across time and space, inspired by all of the public figures and everyday people had come before us to stand against bigotry, division, and hate. 

We were also afraid. 

We didn’t ask to resist and dissent. Many of us would have preferred to stay in the realm of light and love, but we stood up and spoke up anyway. We were imperfect in this process. Our voices shook. When it came to those of us who possessed privilege of one kind or another, our biases showed. And yet...

Finally, here in November 2020, we can say that our resistance, in whatever form it took, was effective. Well, effective enough for the moment. There’s still so much to do. There's good trouble to make.

Still, many of us are afraid. Afraid that our win, though decisive, was not a landslide and all too many people still back a bully and a liar. Afraid about what happens as the current occupant of the White House continues to deny his defeat.

Angry. Inspired. Afraid. 

This is a heady cocktail. It can make you brave, but then it can leave you stumbling with a hangover and morning after regret. Any movement or action motivated by fear is going to be followed by a bitter aftertaste, and it’s never going to be as effective as when you’re motivated by faith.

Most of the time, I am free of fear and full of hope. But that takes daily, focused effort as I work to stay informed even as I turn down the voices of division and panic that scream from both ends of the spectrum. I return to the rhythm of the earth, to the divine source that’s so much vaster than any human political process. 

Let’s not erase the old feelings. Let’s not try to simply “poitiveify” them away. Instead, let’s acknowledge the fear and anger and treat them as what they are: the dead stalk of last season’s growth, now fortifying the next season of growth like so much emotional compost. Let's plant something new. Together.

Now, we can celebrate a new day and a new chapter in the story.

Instead of working against and hunching over in resistance and defense, we can lean into what we want to work for. 

Our work - of being anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-transphobic, anti-homophobic, anti misogynist - is not done. But now we can write the story a new way:

We are for equality, equity, justice, recognition, and repair. We can work for the recovery of the planet, the restoration of democracy, and the health of society. 

We can tell a new story… What’s your first line?

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Need help uncovering that story that long to tell? I've opened my calendar to add a few more Story Healing sessions in the next few weeks.