I saw a little bird flying today. “You can not fly forever,” I thought, “Without returning to the earth for sugar.” The bird was high up and seemed safe. I thought, “You probably would like to stay up above it all, above the threats of feral cats and snakes. And sometimes you can. But all of those little flaps of those little wings take energy. You need sugar. And you have to risk the earth with its threats for its sweetness.”A couple of nights ago Emma took me to The Sinclair in Cambridge, to see The Lone Bellow perform. (Happy birthday week to me!) Stephen Wilson Jr. was their opener. Like me, he grew up in Indiana. We grew up having very different childhoods in very different corners of Indiana. I was really taken with his music, his mumble, his beat up guitar, his presentation. I saw him up there, and I thought, “You are a story teller, dipping bravely down into your own story for some sort of truth, some sort of balm.” A storyteller being brave is a powerful thing. I felt inspired. One of the things that he said from the stage—while singing a song that he wrote after his father died—was that grief is only love that’s got no place to go.I think that’s a beautiful image. Beautiful and sad and honoring to the things, the places, the people we grieve. Of course, grief does go places. We are the places that grief goes. It moves through us. It comes and it goes in waves in us. Some waves are the size of relationships, and some of them are as big as the earth. I told a grieving friend recently: Your intuition is trustworthy. Your body knows how to grieve. The only way through is through. There aren’t any shortcuts. Grief work can feel aggressive. And you are worthy of relief.Share this post (or some other encouraging word) with someone on your heart who is worthy of relief.You know the French adage: Il faut souffrir pour être belle. One must suffer to be beautiful. I don’t believe that quite to be true. And it’s a mighty dangerous adage in the hands of a patriarchal god. But, as with many dangerous ideas, it’s not devoid of hints of truth. Resilience is at the heart of beauty. And what an abundance comes to a heart that remains supple in loss!Though we fly in our own ways, we’re blessed to be earthbound creatures. Blessed even to risk the trouble of cats in the branches and snakes on the ground. We are brave souls, we who live with purpose and intent, because living, in general, with anything that might be called sweetness, requires the primal courage of a songbird dipping to the earth for sustenance.PS - This post pairs well with Rilke’s poem Rise Up Rooted Like Trees.PPS - And also, of course, with Grief is Only Love, by Stephen Wilson Jr.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

The moon is waning, which means that the nights are growing darker as the days continue to shorten en route to the solstice. This makes it a good time to hunker and reflect. Plus it’s my birthday in a week. I tilt toward being contemplative the whole year round, but this time of year I tend to go especially inward to scan the ways that a year’s worth of days have shaped me and prepared me for another orbit.This year has been one of those years that hinges and swings between a before and an after. I got divorced this year. For those who have walked that path, you know that divorce is more than a moment of pronouncement by a judge. It’s a radical undoing that stretches out from its beginnings in uncertain memories and lingers on in lily pads of grief. At its best divorce is a mutual and loving reorientation. I’ve experienced moments of that. But even at its best there is, I think inevitably, something old testament about divorce. Something gets sacrificed on the altar. Something dies. And the pangs of that death ripple out beyond the two parting solitudes.The other day I was looking out the window and I saw bubbles floating up from the playground in the yard of the nursery school that neighbors our house. I can’t see the yard through the window down to the left from where I sit, but I hear the voices of play throughout the morning and afternoon when I’m at my desk. They were blowing bubbles that afternoon and I saw the bubbles floating up into the sky, into the branches of nearby trees. I watched this through the window. I tried to get a photo, but my camera would only focus on the screen in my window and failed to find the soapy shimmering globes in the world beyond the mesh.A year ago I remember feeling intense resistance to the idea that I might have moved in a way that brought harm to someone who I love. I didn’t see how to braid together with integrity “I have harmed you.” and “I love you.” and “I am good.” So I looked everywhere I could to pad my sense of self with assurances that my intentions were pure.There’s that scene early in the Hebrew bible where the humans scheme for the knowledge of good and evil. They talk to a snake and eat some fruit and something like scales are lifted from their eyes, and everything changes in the way that they see themselves and in the ways that they relate with the world. They aren’t innocent anymore. They aren’t dumb anymore. They don’t get to claim ignorance anymore. Which is another way of saying, that living with integrity from that moment forward would require labor, and the ability to embrace truth in contradicting things. New life would correspond with pain, and sustenance with sweat.It’s taken me most of this past year to pray this—because I have to keep letting go of my insistence on the innocence of my intentions—but part of my daily prayer now is: Give levity and love to those who I’ve harmed. Period. I pray it without qualifications or excuses.And I pray it without losing myself, because I’ve grown in self-confidence this year. It helped when I accepted as true what my friend Luca said to me a couple of months ago: “We have to risk harm to be in relationship at all.” That risk shoots out in all directions, from me as much as toward.Truth is more complicated now. It feels more risky than before to trust that my love is reliable, but I do, and it is. At significant points throughout life I’ve conjured the confidence I’ve needed to take each next step. This year—in the midst of radical reorientation—I’ve really worked to author and authenticate that confidence; to source my movements from the wild center of who I am. My efforts have not been perfect. Sometimes my efforts have been too many, often askew, and sometimes too few. My focus goes in and out, between the bubbles and the mesh, the bubbles and the mesh. But my eyes are open, and the world in the yard is alive with play and possibility. This year has prepared me, and I’m ready for another orbit. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

My friend Michelle wrote this last Friday: “Prayer gives structure and meaning to our thoughts.” Our prayers, she says, “Take patterns of thought and make them specific through the process of naming.” I used to pray with my eyes closed and my hands folded. Sometimes I still do that, because I’m a sucker for nostalgia. But mostly now I pray with my hands full and my eyes looking to the horizon, or at the faces around me, or to the limbs of nearby trees, or the bounce of a candle’s flame. On the altar near the windowsill, alongside of the fern who I told you about last time, are the other material objects that fill my hands and ground my thoughts when I pray.In a sense, each object on my altar is a prayer that I say with my fingers. They are a collection of curated prayers. This curation serves even when articulation fails.A shard of pottery from a tiny blue mug that I broke while walking the dog, copper coins cast by a Scottish artist in the early ’00's, my grandfather’s old harmonica and his hinged carpenter's ruler, a clay bowl with an inscribed incantation that Emma had commissioned for me on my 40th birthday, stones and acorns, some cedar incense, and a turkey feather from a sidewalk in Cambridge sticking out of an empty 80-year-old flattop Hamm’s beer can that I found under a sapling during a day-long solo on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters.Then, when I was unpacking last month, I came on a photo of myself around four years old. That photo is leaning against the rusty can, near a candle and the harmonica. Little Aram is standing with a walking stick in hand, about to set out on a path. His shadow is falling over his right shoulder. If it’s morning in the photo then Aram is looking south. If the sun is setting, Aram is looking north. Either way, his look holds years of earnestness that feels familiar. The decades between then and now are contained there in his countenance. He’s looking toward me. I think he sees me—here, now, at this desk—held in the spirit of what I have become, and who I am becoming. I see him. I see what has filled the space between us. And I channel his courage to gaze beyond now, with the same degree of knowing and pathward anticipation.Today, with a fistful of life, and our eyes wide open, let us pray:Spirit who hovered over the winds of a primal chaos, guide us as we stride toward what’s next, recalling what has been, and washing it anew with each present breath. Guide us as we look to the horizon and give name to our thoughts. As we give shape to our paths, may our every move be inspired by the genius of creation.PS - This one pairs pretty well with Song of Good Hope (a prayer in its own way) by Glen Hansard. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

When I was 22 years old I flew to Scotland to try my hand at wandering my ancestral lands. While I was there I fell in love with places and people and simple routines. I grew up a little bit while I was there. I grew into myself as I maneuvered from one moment into the next, from one encounter toward the next. The six months I spent abroad were tinged with the magic and romance of exploration and the unknown. But it was the basic things, the everyday things, that informed my growth. I remember packing my bags for Scotland in the basement of my dad’s Indianapolis house where I was living for the summer before my trip. On the wall in that basement I had pinned, hand-scrawled on some paper: Let the day suffice.I know why I wrote it—because it’s good counsel. But I can’t remember where I wrote it from. Maybe it was from a book. Hold on. Let me check…[pause from writing to noodle on Google]Ah. Maybe that’s it. Not verbatim, but in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 6 verse 34: Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.Let the day suffice. Let this day be awash with complicated memories from days past and simple thanks in the present. Let this moment, and moments like it, fill up with fascination in the most basic things situated in the most basic places.On the windowsill, lined up from right to left there is:* an empty bottle, formerly full of A Midwinter Night’s Dram, that my brother gave me a few years back and that we drank together in the woods in Maine;* a sprout of a plant in some water in a tiny glass jar left by the one who sat, before me, at his desk in front of this window;* four rocks that feel good in the palm of my hand, each with their own collection of sentiments, some of which I remember;* a bit of amethyst that I bought at Stones and Stuff in Portland to help me hold and clear some energy a while back when I was shifting from one way of working to another;* a jar of Blackwing pencils, most of which I’ve whittled down with use, such that they would now serve very well on a putt-putt course;* a rustic wooden figurine of a painter holding his palette;* all of that and, at half-past seven in the morning, a wash of sunlight.The room doesn’t get much direct sunlight. The staghorn fern, who sits on the altar next to my desk, doesn’t mind. A touch from the rays in the morning—when the sun looks in at an angle, and hits the corner where he sits for 15 minutes, before arching out of sight—seem to be sufficient for him.Each day is a cluster of moments of sunlight and moments of shadow. And—How do they say it?—how we spend our days is how we spend our life.It’s sometimes hard for me to recognize the version of me that was waking up each morning in a hostel in Edinburgh a couple of decades ago. That was several Aram’s past. I’ve lined up a lot of memories on the windowsill of life since then. But I wake each day with familiar companions who were with me even then, who have been with me all along, who I trust will accompany me right on through. I wake each day companioned by wanderlust and dedication, with a measure of peace and a bit of disquiet, with gratitude and curiosity. I wake every morning in the midst of everything else with some sort of confidence—that can only have fastened itself to my heart by grace—that today, this day, will suffice.PS – This post, and yesterday’s festivities over here in the States, and pretty well any day that you’re willing to consider it, pair well with Br. David Stendl-Rast’s meditation: A Good Day. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

I took a course with the Academy for Coaching Excellence last week to lay the foundation and establish my commitment to a year of training. When it was my turn to share my occupation I told my colleagues and instructors that I work as a minister of spiritual formation. That’s the broadest stroke I’ve managed.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

My sister taught me to braid friendship bracelets in the backseat while our parents drove us around the country to Christian youth camps where my dad was the preacher... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

The printed list of affirmations that is masking-taped to the cover of my journal begins with: “I am creative.” That’s the bass note. That’s what I’m here (arguably what we’re all here) for... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

I was walking among a bunch of wolf trees in the Green Mountains in southern Vermont. This was last Friday. The sun had begun to set, and with it a week’s worth of efforts. The first mile of the trail was steep. I move at a quick pace when I’m walking solo. So, with the exertion and rapid elevation gain, I could count my pulse from the throb in my ears. At the top of that first mile, where the trail flattens out, I found myself in the arms of a birch tree. Tears caught in the stubble on my face. Worn out from the climb and relieved by the quiet, everything was a metaphor. And I heard a whisper—not audible but verbatim—that landed on me with a pang of grief and of pride: My ancestors were keepers of the forest.I don’t know if that’s precisely true. I don’t know a lot about my ancestors. But the sentence formed in my heart and felt like an echo of truth coming at me from those who precede me. “Aram, your ancestors were keepers of the forest.” I scribbled in my notebook…I don’t know if that constellation of particular trees actually commingled in the forests of my ancestors. (Any foresters, or arboreal historians of northern Europe, out there willing to save me a trip down Google lane? Help me polish my slapdash poem?)I don’t know if my ancestors were actually charged with the forest’s care. (Any relatives out there with that knowledge? Help me polish my slapdash sense of self?)On another level, of course, I do know. Insofar as I am an embodied and emotional product of my ancestors’ values, vocations, and dreams—my experience of relief in the arms of a birch is all the proof I need of what they were up to in the world.I like to imagine that some of you reading this don’t already know me. So: Hi, I’m Aram. My ancestors were keepers of the forest. In a way, I suppose, so am I. Welcome to the woods. I’m glad you’re here.There are others, probably most, of you who are already part of the ecology of my life. We’ve spent time walking forest (and canyon and mountain and urban) trails together. We’ve criss-crossed in digital, social, and professional spaces. Hey friends. I’m happy you’re here too.And it’s good, for me too, to be here. Here and now.Last week, the day after the hug from the birch, I finished reading Frederick Buechner’s  memoir of vocation: Now and Then. He takes the title from Paul Tillich:We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard… that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation.I sure hope that’s true. I have a good amount of faith that it is. It’s what I’m here to explore, and to open up about.More soon.PS — Here’s a good read if you want to learn more about wolf trees.PPS — This post pairs well with I Wake in Joy by Deb Talan. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com