The Power Within ~ Field Journal

There is something almost strange about an airplane sitting on the ground. It is enormous. Powerful. Engineered with incredible precision. Built to carry people across mountains, oceans, countries, even continents. And yet, when it is parked at the gate, none of that potential is being expressed. It is safe. It is still. It is familiar. But it is not doing what it was created to do. Planes were made to fly. And I think sometimes we forget that we were, too. Not literally, of

I realized something this morning that landed in me differently than it ever has before. Every one of us enters this world in the middle of a story already being told. We do not choose the family system. We do not choose the beliefs, the wounds, the addictions, the fears, the roles, the tension, the silence, the expectations, or the drama already in motion. We arrive. We are dropped into a story already in play. And because we are children, because we are completely dependent

Sometimes I think life is like looking at a tapestry from much too close. We see one tiny section. A few threads. A little color. One crossing. One knot. One place that makes no sense at all. And because that is all we can see in the present moment, we start trying to decide what the whole picture means from that one tiny fragment. We decide something has gone wrong. We decide the pattern is off. We decide the thread we are looking at is ugly, unnecessary, confusing, or out o

Every time you get in your car, you are living out a simple process. You want to go somewhere. The grocery store. A friend’s house. Your child’s house. Grandma’s. The coast. Disneyland. Wherever it is, you have a destination in mind. Then you decide: That is where I am going. And once you decide, your energy organizes around getting there. You choose the road. You make the turns. You stop at the stop signs. You follow the detours. You adjust when there is construction. You ma

Yesterday, I was looking at one of the giant oak trees on our property. These trees are enormous. Grounded. Strong. Fully themselves. And scattered underneath them are acorns. Tiny things. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. And then there are the sprouts. Those first tender shoots reaching out of the ground. And I had this thought: I would never look at that tiny sprout and say, “What is wrong with you?” “Why are you taking so long?” “Why aren’t you bigger yet?” “L

I’ve been sitting with a question lately. A big one. Not because I want to be morbid. Because I want to be awake. Gay Hendricks tells a story in Five Wishes about an interaction that changed the direction of his life. He was asked to imagine that his life was ending and to consider whether he would be completely satisfied with the way he had lived it. That question has stayed with me. Because the truth is, none of us knows how much time we have. We assume tomorrow. We plan fo