Blooming

My brain and I are becoming good friends. She does her best and how brilliantly she connects ideas. I will love her through every challenging trial. For what have we not already overcome together? I can promise many things to this budding friendship. Like how I promise to always love you even when we feel immense embarrassment for putting ourselves out there from trying something new. I promise to always prioritize comfort and safety over fitting in to the best of my abilities. And I can promise to try and take care of my body the best I can in order to make sure you can function to the best of your abilities. To keep showing up. To keep showing up is always the first step for me these days. Do it imperfectly, do it scared, do it crying for all I care. Because to be present is to be human. To pick a goal and push and pull your way to it is magick. This is how witchcraft saved my life. Know where the bar is. But where have I set it? If it keeps moving, where am I? Who am I? How would I ever know the answer if baseline was never a constant to look in the mirror and admire? To pull myself down into the mundane and say “there you are, I love you” has to be the most powerful act I can, in my 28 years, imagine to do. To zoom out enough to see all the rivers that make up me as they erode the corse earth surrounding them and flow back into the salty sea of self. To truly feel those vs. myself. To see how everything buds up against each other as if to say “I see you, therefore, I see me” and bloom beside each other as a result. To taste sweetness in the simplest, most fleeting moments. To smell the memories of being a child in the fields. Where the trees still remember me and to this day welcome me home. To accept my senses as a gift at a 7 instead of a 10 because what is there to truly enjoy in excess, and how this messy life is best enjoyed in the smallest of moments, book-ended in prideful hard work and deep rest. I am an ecosystem in myself, staring at everything in awe as I have begun to find my place, as I am finding my home, and coming to terms with this is the most beautiful chaotic mess I could have ever dreamed of.

To breath.

To live.

To accept.

To grow.

To friendships like the one with my brain, thank you for helping me write this. I’m looking forward to sharing with more friends in the future.

• A culmination of journal entries by Olivia Sloan, shared at the first Weaving Words on 3.8.25