Over the past few weeks, I keep returning to one very simple thought, though for some reason it has taken a long path for it to stop being merely a thought: I am already here. I can stop searching... I do not need to become someone else first in order to begin living. I do not need to complete another transformation, receive confirmation, wait for the right love, the right job, the right amount of money, recognition, the success of a project, or some special inner state after which I can finally say “Noooooooow! my real life has FINALLY begun!” THAT, my friends, will never happen. 

I already exist. I am breathing. I have a body. The Earth is beneath my feet. And perhaps one of the most persistent human illusions is precisely this: that real life is always supposed to begin a little later.

I had to move through several very different inner spaces before I could truly feel this. First there was a Smell...  then Taste - the ability to stop explaining what was happening and simply live it... Then came Clarity: I do not need to know the whole road; it is enough to see the next step. After that came Release, when I began to distinguish love itself from the image of its future that I had created. Then came Realization, where I had to allow myself to be human: to WANT love, money, pleasure, recognition... to get angry, feel afraid, make mistakes, and sometimes fail to match my own idea of what a spiritual woman should be. There was Knowing, which already existed inside me even while external reality had not yet taken its shape. There was Bliss, which turned out to be nothing like the constant ecstatic state the mind likes to imagine. There was Inertia, which showed me the old “good girl” still trying to buy the right not to be rejected through adaptation, which also showed me how my active mind gets bored when it doesn't receive HUGE rush of positive energies all the time... or negative as an alternative... as long as I am our of wack emotionally, my mind HATES inertia... And somehow, all of it eventually brought me to Earth.

And Earth did not feel like a return “downward” after all those states. Quite the opposite! It became the place where everything I had understood finally had to become life. Not higher, not deeper, not another mystery, not another level of awareness, into the body, into matter, into money, into home, into work, into relationships, into food, into clothes, into bills, into the hands that can take a piece of fabric and turn it into a dress... Into the cabins that need to be cleaned before guests arrive...  Into the forest that is not a beautiful symbol of a forest, but something that smells of pine, gets wet in the rain, sheds needles, grows mushrooms, and asks for care... Into the most ordinary Thursday, when perhaps nothing grand is happening at all.... 

Last year, I had another deeply transformative experience in which I felt as if I became the Earth herself. I could feel people walking over me, rushing from one thing to the next, barely noticing the very ground beneath their feet: the thing that holds them, feeds them, carries them, and makes their lives possible. We look down and call it dirt, as if it is insignificant, as if it is nothing. But it is not nothing. It is everything. Only now I am integrating that huge experience I had. Earth is fertility, soil, nourishment, money, matter, the ability to receive and the ability to give. It is the substance from which human life takes form. Earth is an immense womb: it receives the seed, holds it in darkness, nourishes it, and eventually brings forth life. It feeds us, gives us the materials from which we build our homes, make our clothing, prepare our food, and create the objects that surround us. And in the end, it receives our bodies back again...

This is why my relationship with Earth no longer feels abstract or symbolic to me. It is profoundly practical and embodied. It is in the food I prepare (and I cook DIVINE food!), the plants I grow, the money I earn and steward, the order I create in a home, the warmth and beauty I bring into a space, the herbs I gather and work with, the systems I build, the resources I choose to respect instead of consume unconsciously. To work with Earth is to work with matter itself: to understand how to receive what is given, how to shape it, how to care for it, and how to return something through our own participation. 

And this, to me, is the real magic of Earth: the magic of turning matter into LIFE. I am also a mother, twice! 

And today, while I was dancing and later sitting in the sauna, I suddenly felt something else so physically that words came only afterward: the body is the material instrument through which life is lived. Everything I call my life has to pass through it somehow. I may have consciousness, ideas, images, intentions, love, memory, dreams.... but for consciousness to become an actual human life, it needs matter... It is a sacred marriage within you! High and low, Divine and Material... Consciousness needs hands that can take hold of fabric. It needs legs that can carry me through the forest. Lungs into which air can enter. A mouth that can taste. Skin that can meet steam in the sauna, cold water, another person’s touch, a dog’s fur, the bark of a tree. A voice that can sing, scream, say “I love you!” or “I want!” or “I’m afraid!” or simply “no.” A nervous system through which fear becomes trembling, grief becomes tears, love becomes warmth, pleasure becomes relaxation, and music becomes movement.

Without a body I could not dance a single prayer. I could not hug my daughter, cook soup, plant something, write a text, take another person’s hand, look into someone else's eyes and FEEL their depth... or gather herbs, make a sauna whisk, build a house, clean a room, or sew a dress. Even the most beautiful idea would remain only an idea if it did not one day enter matter through my fingers, my voice, my legs, my womb, my eyes, my breath, my actions. And so I increasingly resist seeing the body as merely a shell for consciousness or a temporary vehicle that needs to be disciplined for the sake of some higher spiritual experience. The body is the place where consciousness gets the chance to become life.

And then the phrase “I am a creator” begins to open for me in an entirely different way. To create in human form is not only to imagine a different reality, and not only to feel inspiration moving through you. It is the capacity to bring form into matter. Yesterday I sewed myself a dress in three hours. Today that simple act feels no less sacred to me than many practices I have gone through. First there was fabric. Then there was my vision. There was knowledge, practice, hands, eyes, the ability to measure, cut, join. Three hours later, something existed in a form that had not existed before. My daughters saw the dress and both asked me to make one for them too. There it is! the completely ordinary alchemy of human existence: matter met consciousness AND your mind through the body, and a new form appeared.

When I look at my life through this principle, I suddenly see that I do this constantly. I create space in the forest, I cook, I work with herbs, I make creams, I sew, I write, I build corporate programs. Even my corporate life was the same process: I took a chaos of requirements, risks, technologies, people, and processes, and made a system out of it. Now I look at spiritual business and I can see how to bring it into the American market without hollowing out its meaning, while also refusing to turn spirituality into a territory where lack of structure and responsibility is excused by sacredness. Or the other extreme - to continue lying to others about this beautiful spirituality... I can see how depth can coexist with systems, mystery with ethics, spirituality with a sustainable business model. I no longer need to prove this ability to anyone. I can see it because I can look back and see the many forms I have already created.

At one time, all of these parts of me seemed completely unrelated. Privacy programs and herbs. Strategy and sauna. Legal architecture and sacred dance. Creams and the international market. Cabins and women’s programs. A dress and a mystery. But now I can see the same verb behind all of them: to create. To see possibility where form does not yet exist, to enter into relationship with it, give it structure, nourish it, embody it, and then allow what has been created to live on or allow it to die without that beautiful foreverafter. Maybe my nature was never scattered among a dozen different professions and identities after all. Maybe I have been doing the same thing all along, only with different tools... 

I am especially drawn to the idea of meeting Earth directly through the body: sitting on the ground, touching the grass, lying against the soil, breathing with the landscape, embracing trees, feeling their roots, and allowing the body to enter a natural rhythm before the mind rushes in to name, explain, or turn the experience into a concept... And there the tree appears as a conduit: its roots enter the Earth, its crown opens into the air, and one living body joins the two realms! A few weeks ago I spent several hours alone walking through Afton field. I lay in the grass, held it, pressed myself against enormous pines, cried, sang, growled, danced, made sounds. I was not trying to get anything in particular, and I did not even want to understand exactly what was happening to me. Now I can see the value of that experience precisely in this: I was beginning to stop living life only through explanations of life. I was returning to direct contact with it.

I feel an enormous kinship with the image of a tree. Roots go down into the Earth. The crown opens into the air. Between them is a living body that connects these spaces. And more and more, a human being looks similar to me. We can think, imagine, create meaning, dream, feel something vast...  and at the same time we eat, sweat, sleep, age, make love, cry, get sick, give birth, cook, build, grow things, earn money, clean the house. For some reason humanity has spent so long trying to call the first part elevated and the second part lower. But it is precisely materiality that allows everything invisible to become lived life.

I love the wind. And I love feeling the air as some enormous field of interconnectedness, almost like a mycelium in which we all exist. I breathe it in, and it becomes part of the processes of my body... I breathe it out and return it to the space around me. Water moves through me. Minerals and organic matter from food become part of my body. My body interacts with the world, transforms matter, and one day will return to its cycles too.  I am not separate from this system. I am temporarily one of its living forms, through which matter gets the possibility to feel, create, choose, and experience itself. I breathe the same air that existed from the beginning of times... I drink the same water that existed from the beginning of times... 

And here I want to rehabilitate another instrument: the mind. For a long time, in spiritual practice, the mind can easily become almost a suspect: it analyzes, controls, invents stories, creates expectations. It certainly knows how to do all of that. But today I felt another function of it. The mind is exquisitely adapted to help the body navigate material reality. It allows us to remember, calculate, compare, plan, learn, anticipate consequences, and choose a sequence of actions. To sew a dress, inspiration is not enough. To build a business, it is not enough to feel its soul. To build a house, loving the Earth is not enough. To accompany another person, a big heart is not enough. Matter demands knowledge, structure, plans, boundaries, time, sequence, responsibility... Consciousness sees possibility, the body allows action, and the mind helps organize that action within the conditions of this reality... It's your glue in this life... 

The problem, it seems, begins when the mind stops managing my actions and starts trying to manage life itself, issuing it a technical specification for the required result. This is where I saw my enormous complaint against the Earth. I wanted money and money came and still comes, but I complain: “That is not much!” I wanted a career... and I built an enormous professional life, but at some point I said: “Not the right one.” I wanted recognition... and I was recognized, invited, asked for my opinion, trusted with deeply complex work, but still something inside said: “They should see me differently.” I wanted a forest... and I have my forest, my pines, my cabins, my sauna, my guests, my herbs, my mushrooms, the ability to create a very special space there, and still I sometimes look at the booking calendar and ask: “Why aren’t my cabins renting the way I want them to to the people I thought I was building them for?”

The same thing happened with love. I wanted love. And I was given love! a great... complicated, beautiful, painful love that changed me forever. But it did not become the shared life I had imagined. And then the mind tried to revise the fact of what had been given: if love did not survive everything, if the person did not choose me in the way I wanted, if the relationship did not arrive where I was leading it, perhaps the love was not real after all? Only now am I beginning to see how strange this human habit can be: we receive a gift and almost immediately begin judging it by how closely it matches the packaging we imagined in advance. We begin to devalue of what we have! The greatest gifts!

We say: if love is real, it should survive everything. If a man loves me, he should choose in a certain way. If a relationship is real, it should last. If a path is mine, it should open. If the business is right, it should grow quickly. If I am in my power, I should feel uplifted. If I am home, I should feel good. And then reality turns out to be alive and refuses to comply with the terms of our internal contract. Love can be real and people can still fail to build a life together. A forest can be beautiful and the cabins can still take time to fill the way I want them to. The path can be mine and I can still sometimes have no idea where it is leading. I can be exactly where I need to be and still wake up on a perfectly ordinary Thursday without inspiration.

And that too is life. Not a defect in life, not an intermission between real events, not proof that I have lost my way. I had to live through a period when nothing particularly important seemed to be happening and notice how strongly the mind resists that kind of life. It wants a story... Movement and actions... Falling in love.... A breakthrough! A big project! A sign! A state!  and something that would allow me to feel: “Yes! Now I am FINALLY alive.” And then one day an extremely inconvenient truth reveals itself: I was living the entire time... Even in sadness. Even in uncertainty. Even when nothing was happening that would make a beautiful story.

This has changed my understanding of Bliss most of all. I increasingly see it less as a continuous emotional high. When I asked myself what in my completely ordinary life is already bliss, the answer turned out to be almost everything. My daughters... My family... The forest... The pines... Herbs and mushrooms... Food, the sauna, dance, a movie I watch alone or with my daughter... Driving and belting out songs at the top of my lungs.... The ability to make things with my hands... But the most important discovery came afterward: none of this has to feel like bliss every time in order to be it. I can live in the middle of an enormous gift and still feel sad today. I can love the forest and not want to go for a walk today. I can be home without feeling the state of “being home.” Life does not cease to be life because the feeling of life is absent.

And maybe that is why Inertia matters so much to me now. I am beginning to see how many old mechanisms can continue running long after we have changed internally. We may keep maintaining identities we have already outgrown, remain inside familiar structures simply because they are familiar, wait for some future circumstance to give us permission to move, or edit parts of ourselves in order to remain acceptable to the people around us. Somewhere beneath all of this often lives the old “good girl”, the part of us that learned to preserve belonging through adaptation, to calculate how much of ourselves is safe to reveal, and to avoid choices that might lead to disapproval or rejection. And one of the most revealing questions we can ask when we notice ourselves doing this is: “Am I choosing this because it is truly what I want or am I buying with it the right not to be rejected?”

For me, this question goes much deeper than an invitation to become defiant, stop considering others, or suddenly make every private part of my life public. Freedom does not require confession. Authenticity does not mean complete exposure. There are experiences, relationships, truths, and parts of our inner lives that may be deeply real and important without belonging to everyone. We are allowed to choose what we share, with whom, when, and in what form. Privacy can be an expression of sovereignty rather than fear. But there is an important distinction I am learning to notice: am I keeping something private because it feels sacred, personal, or simply not meant for a particular audience... or am I hiding it because I am afraid that being fully known might cost me someone’s approval, belonging, love, or acceptance? The silence may look exactly the same from the outside, while coming from two entirely different places inside.

And somehow Earth gathers all of these realizations together. Because it brings me out of concepts and back to one very simple question: what have I already been given? Not what I was promised. Not what I deserved... Not what was supposed to happen... What is already in my hands? Earth is a recognition of its contribution: we cannot endlessly use its fruits without noticing the source from which they came. And this is not only about nature in the narrow sense, but also about our relationship with matter, resources, food, money, things, how much we take, and how much we return.

I am beginning to carry this question into my entire life. I was given this love: can I be grateful for it without demanding that it become something else retroactively? I was given this career: can I recognize everything it gave me even if I no longer want to continue it in its old form? I was given abilities I have used for decades: can I stop dismissing them as irrelevant simply because something new is calling me now? I was given a forest: can I first see the astonishing fact of that gift before opening the booking calendar? I was given a body that has carried me through love, motherhood, work, illness, travel, dance, sauna, forest, and transformation: can I finally stop treating it like the service staff of my consciousness and begin relating to it as a participant in this whole mystery?

Gratitude, in this sense, does not ask me to stop wanting. I can be grateful for money and still want more. I can be grateful for my career and complete that chapter. I can love my forest and look for ways to increase occupancy. I can be grateful to someone for love and still refuse a form of relationship that no longer fits my truth. I can be grateful to my body and care for what is changing within it. Gratitude does not cancel movement; it ends the habit of declaring what has already been given insufficient simply because the next harvest has not yet ripened.

And then creation itself begins to look different. I do not control the harvest, but I participate in growing it. I can prepare the soil, plant the seed, water it, notice where there is not enough light, learn, change my strategy, pull weeds, add nutrients. But I cannot grab a sprout by the top and yank it out of the ground faster simply because I have a plan and a deadline. This is where, for me, two forces of Earth come together — gratitude and creation. Gratitude says: “I see what has already grown.” Creation answers: “And now I will work with what I have been given.”

And this is exactly where my old question about how to “move to the next level of my power” begins to sound almost strange to me. Why did I decide that power lives on the next level? Why does it have to look like an even stronger state, even greater realization, an even clearer purpose? Maybe my power already exists in the ability to be fully present where I am. Yesterday I sewed a dress in three hours. I know how to build a program from nothing. I can see a system where others see disconnected parts. I know how to create warmth, cook, work with matter, organize complex processes. I can create a space a person enters and, for a while, remembers the childhood expectation of magic. I know how to love deeply, and I can survive the collapse of an imagined future without declaring the past a lie. I can be afraid and still keep moving. I can fail to understand what is happening to me and still trust the body enough to sing, cry, dance, lie in the grass. I know how to think, feel, build, grow, transform. And all of this is already happening here.

My power was never somewhere above me. Maybe power is the degree to which I am embodied here. And then I no longer want to choose between the spiritual and the material, the mind and the body, business and the sacred. I see more and more clearly that my task may be precisely in the joining. Spirituality that cannot enter matter remains an experience. Business without soul becomes a mechanism. A feeling without a form of relationship may remain a real feeling, but it does not become an actual shared life. Vision without action remains vision. And the body becomes the place where the invisible gets the chance to become visible.

That is why the tree speaks to me so strongly now as an image of the human being. It does not argue about what matters more, roots or crown. Without roots it cannot rise toward the sky, and without a crown it cannot live its nature as a tree. It exists through connection. And I increasingly do not want to leave Earth for the sake of Heaven or reject Heaven for the sake of Earth. I want to conduct one through the other: consciousness through the body, idea through the hands, love through action, spirituality through ethics and form, beauty through matter, freedom through real choices rather than only through inner experiences.

Here is a thought:  the elements are not somewhere outside us and do not first need to be “received”: they are already part of human existence, we breathe, there is water in us, warmth, the materiality of the body...  we are already included in the system. And I want to live this idea beyond a beautiful metaphor. I do not need to arrive at nature, because I never left it. I do not need to deserve Earth, because my body already belongs to its materiality. I do not need to feel a sacred state every time for the connection to exist. Even when I feel nothing, I am breathing. Even when I am dissatisfied with life, my heart continues to beat. Even when the mind demands a different reality, my feet are still standing on this one.

And so the phrase “I am truly home” now means much more to me than a feeling of safety or love for a particular place. Of course, my forest remains one of the places where I remember this most easily. But home can no longer depend even on the forest. Home is the condition of belonging to my own life, in which I no longer need to wait until reality becomes beautiful enough for me to agree to be present in it. I can be home in joy and in sadness, in knowing and in uncertainty, in love and after the collapse of an image of the future, in harvest and in the season when nothing is yet visible above the soil.

I have a body through which consciousness can live this human life. I have a mind that can help me navigate material reality. I have Earth, giving me the matter with which I can interact. I have hands with which I can touch, cook, build, sew, grow, and embrace. I have a voice with which I can sing, speak truth, and establish boundaries. I have a heart capable of loving even when love does not take the form I imagined. I have the capacity to see what has already been given, to be grateful for it, and at the same time to continue desiring, choosing, and creating.

And this is what I now call my magic. Not power over life, and not the ability to force reality to match my design. Magic increasingly becomes for me the ability to enter into relationship with what already exists and, together with it, create the next form. I do not create the Earth, the air, the water, the body, another person, or life itself. All of that is given to me. But I am given the astonishing human possibility of meeting what is given consciously, allowing it to pass through me, transforming it, and leaving behind something that did not exist before: a dress, a house, a program, food, a space, a conversation, a touch, a decision, a relationship, an idea, a new way of living.

I was never promised that every seed I plant would become exactly the tree I drew in my mind. I was never promised that every love would become a lifelong partnership, every talent would become recognition, every project would become success, every morning would become inspiration. But I was given something far more fundamental: the possibility of being here and participating. I was given Earth as the matter of my existence, the body as the way to live this life, consciousness as the ability to witness it, and the mind as an instrument with which I can act within this reality. And the more deeply I feel this, the less I want to “move into my power” as though it were somewhere else. I want to enter it with my whole body, in the most ordinary Thursday, through whatever is already here in front of me.

I am no longer waiting for my real life to begin. I am already inside it. And when I remember that, even the most ordinary day stops being an interval between important events. It becomes life itself... the only material of time from which I can create anything at all.

I am already here. I am truly home. And with what I have been given, I create.