What If You Turn Your Gaze Toward Joy Now?

Adorn your life in color, or don’t,

if that feels good.

Dance in the streets,

laugh loudly,

heal loudly,

hope loudly.

Take up all the space you need, and dare to love

the skin you’re in.

Wear joy as resilience and resistance. But also

wear joy because it feels good

and pleasure is not a dangerous thing as some would have us believe.

Be fully you – own your mess and struggle

and wisdom and awkwardness and beauty

and own your pain.

Own all of it.

Turn away from places and people that need you to be quieter for their comfort or gain.

To squish your big self into a tiny, palatable, soul-crushing box.

Name your joy and your fear, shame and judgement-free,

question everything.

And bathe yourself in compassion; like body butter, or holy oil, spread it thick over your parched skin.

Then, once you are full again, walk through the world in wholeness and integrity, dripping hope and new possibility as you go.

Leak it from your cracks. Spill it over from the fullness of who you are – so filled up you cannot help but slosh it messily as you walk or dance.

Don’t ever believe the lie that just because others are not free, and they don’t want you to be free,

that you are bad, wrong, or broken.

Walk out your values,

embody your joy,

come home to your True Self.

Don’t wait to feel ready;

we heal up our broken spaces in progress, not before.

We find our way in action, not before.

We grow into our name in action, not before.

What if joy is your birthright, your natural, wild state?

What if you are already strong, wise, and brave, and no one can give you this and no one can take it away from you?

There is nothing you can buy to make you whole.

But we can gather together, share stories, witness each other, wail alongside each other,

as we do the brave work of grief and reclamation.

Hold your head high. Remember how to play, listen, just be.

You can name your strength, resilience, and power

and also name your weariness and need for rest.

Let go of working so damn hard.

What if you turn your gaze toward joy now? What if you reclaim your freedom, wholeness, and joy?

What if you open your mouth, and you open up your chest, arms splayed wide, and you ROAR?

Release the fire that brought you this far,

allow it, as it hits the air, to be transformed into something new.

Krista xo