As I set up my calendar for the month, I select a quote I’ve found that speaks to me. I write it in my planner and leave space below it to capture phrases I hear or read that speak to me and relate to the quote. I found this practice centers me throughout the month, and helps me be more present in my conversations, meetings, and readings. For July 2025, my quote was: “Being Where My Feet Are.”
I’m once again in physical therapy. Adjusting and rebuilding my body through dry needling, physical manipulation, stretches, exercises, stretchy bands, weights, and the damn foam roller. Such precise focus on my body – and getting the chain of events to work better together with intention and muscle memory – shows me just how disconnected I am from it. I wear my body every day, but with such little thought.
Here are the quotes, lyrics, and phrases that that caught the attention of my head and heart as I lived in the “backcountry of my soul”:
- It may take a lifetime to unwind you
- Grief reveals and reweaves
- Beneath the ache, something radical is at work
- Chaos wrapped in melody
- In spaces where difference and tenderness can coexist
- On the day each of you were born, you were covered in the dust of the first-day creation; you were forged out of the most brilliant of celestial fires; never take for granted all of that radiates in you; you were born to blaze – don’t forget
- A vigilant witness to the magic of everything
- Teach us how to live tender but not undone; Help us carry the weight of this world to you—not on us
- Become a living witness to the million beautiful curiosities of your life
- There are some people who have sun inside
- Someone left fingerprints on your heart so brightly, the light still catches on them
- That you lived a moment so fully its echo still finds its way back into our lungs
- God, please put my feet on the path of your will
- Change is grief
- We write to taste life twice—in the moment and in retrospect
- Plant seeds in the garden of your own mind
If physical therapy, yoga, and mindfulness have taught me anything it’s just how disconnected I am from myself. How much of my body and mind are on autopilot … or checked out completely. These practices also show me – time and time again – just how much wisdom is in my body.
All that it stores. All that it communicates. All that it makes possible.
It’s an immense source of knowledge, as well as an articulate warning system.
My most priceless commodity that I often lug around rather than listen to.
These mind-body centered practices also show me how uncomfortable it can be, to be with myself – my body. Each intentional visit shows me a new internal landscape. The aches I find from loss. The emotional landmines waiting patiently. The pockets of pixie dust left by love. The darkness of doubt. The electrical crackle of new ideas. The constant, soft murmur of faith. The deep in my DNA exhaustion. The tension-formed boulders I carry. The fragments of others I store for rainy days. The golden thread that ties me from the earth to the stars, connected to something more than the arteries, veins, organs, muscles, and bones that are my being.
My body is both a map of and guide to my life’s journey.
A map in constant formation.
Storing the past. Absorbing the now. Adjusting for next.
The map of a body – a being – that is still evolving.
Here’s to being a better map reader.
