Manifesto of My Open Heart

An unabashed declaration of my life's desires

This manifesto started as a stream-of-consciousness in my Morning Pages one day on my Creative Bliss retreat in Costa Rica, and has been lightly edited for rhythm and completeness. I’m sharing here for my own accountability and for curious minds. I plan to revisit this throughout my sabbatical to either evolve it, or make it even more decisive and grounded. 🙏

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Created in Mid-Journey by @pixiemedley

I want to inhale the humidity, the sea, the blue sky, and the thin air.

I want to suck all of the emerald elixir from the jewel that is the jungle and fill my body with it, drowning my heart, my lungs, my belly, my pelvis, and my vagina. Overflowing into my legs, slow and thick like honey.

I want to take walks on a long stretch of beach that morphs over distance and time, with my moods.

I want a place to flourish, to commune, and to isolate, with papaya to soothe my gut and pineapple to heal my blood.

I want a home that welcomes family, friends, and strangers.

I want a community to serve, to lead, to mother, to create.

I want an Art Camp with drawers of paints, markers, pencils, and pastels. Drawers of unmade treasures from construction paper, tissue paper, and magazine scraps. From a closet of knives, jigsaws, bolts and screws, protractors and compasses, hammers and nails.

I want to build a rain shower overlooking a landscape of awe-inspiring jagged mountains.

I want to stock the shower with soaps that smell like a magic forest of cedar, sandalwood, lemongrass, pine, eucalyptus, rosemary, and lavender; where the pipes and the plumbing look like lush vines. (It’s cool that vine and vein are pretty much the same word.)

I want a playground of trails, up and down mountains that carry my Ghost and my Devotion, my Speedgoats and my Peregrines. Muddy trails where I lose myself, ravish in my suffering, and then convene with my most rawest most beautifullest self.

I want a home filled with collections, curios, and heart-born creations.

Weavings, paintings, doodles, sketches, pencil charcoal and black marker drawings that are complete and perfect, just as they are. Black and white and brave enough to be colorless, and yet hold fearless combinations of colors that take up space.

I want a place where my guitar will be cradled and accompanied by the sounds of birds and bugs and night creatures.

I want warm cuddles from animal friends. Dogs, cats, chickens. Goats? Pigs?

I want guidance from trees that protect, shelter, clean the air, grow, shed, and share their centuries of wisdom. That provide hope, health, prosperity, safety, and strategy. That tell me when to move, when to stop, where to turn to left, or right, or - the scariest of all - when to turn around, and to say: “This is not working for me.”

Those failures - No, those lessons - tattooed on me as a scar, tell a story that only I can understand.

I want a partner - my consult, my champion, my playmate, my support, my second set of hands. My 1+1 = 3, or 5, or 800 gajillion.

And when the inevitable storms cause erosion and carry in debris that blocks our flow, and the runoff starts to destroy our forest, we will say:

“Stop. Come back. These rocks are too much for me to carry on my own. This water is too powerful for me to redirect. I need you to help me save this forest.

We can rebuild the river. We can clear the sticks and the leaves and the rocks and the carcasses of the casualties. We can make it right again. But we have to do it together. It is a two-person job.”

This is all I want. That’s it. Only all of it. Is that too much to ask?