Dear friend

stay the path, simplicity is the nectar.

Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!

---

Dear friend,

I know times are hard, strange, and labored. I know grief and trauma swell around you, like a violent sea sometimes. I feel it too. I know deep love is birthing alongside it, but it is easy to feel there is no safe place to land, no idyl ground in which to rest, as the world rolls over on itself to reveal yet another of its aching joints. But this is how we at least begin to heal. Rugs pulled off. Things finally swept clean. The present naked moment is the only real thing we have had anyway, at least that is more clear now—the preciousness of the time we are given.

I’ve found a large piece of joy hides in our presence. Perhaps it’s the secret to our walking in this current landscape. The evergreens are still standing, and spring is still going about turning itself from ashen grey to bright blooms. I am still here with eyes to see it.

The cure is so simple, hiding in clear sight. As close as breath and air, all around us.

Presence

There is nothing we yearn for more than to be looked at and upon by the eyes of someone’s sincere attention. As overdrawn as I was by all the tugging hands, all the questions, all the “look here mama’s”— I managed somehow to maintain a light-footedness about myself today. Mental noise seemed to be missing, and in that divide of light footedness and quiet mind, my two small children played around me as if I were the very sun. The glow from their beings reflects the medicine one gets when receiving someone’s quiet and undivided thoughtfulness.

We slowly meandered down crooked roads, eating thimbleberries, tasting the bitter blue flower of the chicory. Leo rubbed the burnt orange sap of a cottonwood bud across his fingers like butter. I balked at him and then remembered how much I loved the smell of that sap on my fingers. There is no difference except he spreads it across all five tips and I, only modestly, rub it between my pointer finger and thumb.

We lay on our backs, happy to have finished the uphill part of our climb, to find the cool wind current of the belly of the still dark wood. Using the pineapple weed and purple clover as pillows, we watched the moving clouds dance between “ducks” and “dragons” and “horses.” Our heads were so close we became like one giant eye. Breathing. Glad to be together. Delirious on the joy of attention, each other’s, and the great breathing earth under our backs. We were shining at one another, invisible strands of love hidden in our smiles. It was my full-bodied delight to become the faithful witness of these small yet wise and wide lives, turning from green to gold under the light of my very own sun.

Just a short note to remind us how to move through things. Remember to squeeze what presence we can from the simplest moments in our day. The mind says many things, but the heart holds the key to our individual and collective liberation.

your friend on this road,

Sarah

---

Give me feedback •   Subscribe •   Ask Sarah a question

*for technical support contact: support@substack.com