My life’s purpose and focus just got even clearer this last week.

I hope you also feel that.

If not, I want to offer you some resources this month.

One of my strengths is patterns and trends - individuals and groups. I’ll be honest. I don’t hold a lot of hopeful optimism. What I do hold is clarity. Having built a relationship with my grief over these last years always invites me into clarity.

Holding clarity right now feels powerful. Clarity is actionable and offers purpose.

It’s election day in the US.

At this moment, we don’t know the outcome of this election. What we do know is that it has been rife with pisspoor political leadership, has created even more divisive turbulence, and comes with dire consequences.

I want to take this moment to truly ground us—in Earth, in community, and in the shared purpose that binds me and you. As we move forward, I feel in my core a call for embodied action—actions that come from a place of integrity, resilience, and radical care for each other and the world we’re part of.

By embracing slow working, you can take embodied action.

I have a lot of client conversations that start with a version of: “I have to leave my job/career. I can’t take it anymore.”

Before you rage quit, shift into slow first.

Slow is how you get clarity on the decision and you see the bridge you need to build through clear embodied action.

There’s great urgency in the world. Both from the tedious to-dos and from the really critical social issues. To practice slow working, we connect to the work that matters in a slowed down, intentional, and purposeful way. We notice our overing patterns of anxiety and learn to soothe the mind and body in order to regenerate resilience.

Folks talk to me about a tension between slow working and their high-achieving goals, all the good they want to do. I get that. I want both, too.

Okay, to be fair, slow working is not the new trend. YET.

In the words of our favorite San Francisco bicycle shop, Scenic Routes: “Slow is Forever.”

Slow is forever in part because you can’t keep rushing around and expect that’s going to be sustainable or go well long-term.

We need to learn how to hold the duality of loving nature while also mourning its transformation.

The word, Solastalgia, coined almost a decade ago, reflects what many of us feel for the first real time experience of as we witness devastating climate-changed weather. 

“Solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.”

Autumn is the time that plants prepare their seeds for dispersal. Each seed trusts that when the conditions are just right, it will open to start another cycle of life-death-life. How miraculous!

I’m trying to be thoughtful about this both/and seasonal transition space of autumn. Colorado has the heat of late summer days partnered with cool, crisp nights - often 40+ degree day differences. 

By focusing my September workshops on “Seeds of Hope,” my own planning directed (aka forced) me to slow down to hold appreciation and integration of Nature’s lessons.

Autumn equinox was this weekend, and as a gardener, my curiosity turns to the seeds as the gifts and offerings from the summer’s growth. No surprise then that all my September workshops have the theme of seeds.

On a recent podcast with Pinnacle Health, I was asked what I find hopeful given my work with leaders and teams on workplace resilience and, specifically, my climate resilience work. I talked about seeds of hope.

The seeds of hope are these little moments where you experience joy, pleasure, love, and connection. We have to gather seeds of hope and then hold them with care, like the precious containers of life they are.

I think community is something people really yearn for these days, and it seems like many of us don’t know how to find it or cultivate it. Where do you start?

I see people often (1) not knowing they yearn for it until they experience it almost by happenstance - like when someone joins one of my workshops for the content only to leave feeling the community or (2) if they know they crave it, but aren’t sure how to create or find it.

Aligned, regenerative social engagement is a salve to our individual discomfort and loneliness.

One of the ways I know you emphasize resiliency is in community. What is the connection between resilience and community?

[Thanks, Jennifer of Pinnacle Health Solutions - stay tuned for that podcast release!]

In both my organizational Resilient Teams program and Embodied Climate Action workshops, I teach a model of regenerative resilience that is the foundation to building community.

Transitional seasons are full of shifts. I like to mark this time in the calendar with the seasonal transition of Late Summer because my garden pulls my attention with cooler mornings paired with hot afternoons of tomato harvesting.

In our open community call last week, folks talked about the transitions they’re in: reorgs, new leadership at work, career changes, back-to-school routine changes, and the election season.

And with all types of transitional shifts come change and uncertainty. Two words that make human brains freak out! Am I right?

When I was a kid, my mom, who's 5 '2", walked really fast everywhere. I’d be hustling my little kid legs to keep up. And she was never about waiting. We’d always get places late and leave early, especially to my grandmother’s church, but really any place that had a start and end time. Counter that with my dad, who is a tall, lollygagging shoot-the-shitter, as he’d proudly claim.

Put those together, and you get me. Ta-da.

I am highly attuned to transitional times and spaces.