Throughout my life I’ve heard friends talk about their bucket lists. They want to kitesurf in Peru. Bungee Jump in Bali. Have coffee with Dolly Parton in a roadside diner in Tennessee. All of which sound amazing. But my personal bucket list has always been a bit different. For many years now my biggest dreams haven’t required passports or parachutes. As much as I love traversing the world outside, healing my inner world has been most of what I’ve longed to do in this life. So today, sweet community, I share my bucket list.
- To see through the lens of my spirit, and not the bruised and clouded eyes of my wounds.
- To wear my heart on my sleeve, and never grow out of that shirt.
- To stand guard over my own attention.
- To understand how much my attention is worth, and to only let it be bought by the silver in my love’s hair, the gold of an Aspen tree in autumn.
- To grieve the way nature grieves. To weep like the first rain of Spring.
- To communicate with the dead before they die. To listen for the spirit beneath everybody’s mind.
- To think like an inventor. To refuse to be a product of a thought assembly line.
- To sense with senses the world taught us do not exist.
- To know what lives at the root of my fear. To weed that garden until only truth blooms.
- To reckon with my trauma until it is a poem no longer written in blood.
- To know shame can’t live in the light, and let the light fall wherever I am hiding.
- To dance like everyone's watching but so what.
- To channel a mother’s forgiveness.
- To see people as a mystery, especially those I know best.
- To be what Mary Oliver called a bride married to amazement, and to not file for divorce from amazement when my life is hard.
- To know exactly what parts of me are comforted by other people’s approval and comfort those parts myself instead.
- To love my body as if it were my soul’s silhouette.
- To break the vows I have made to my suffering.
- To interrupt my judgments, criticisms, blames knowing they are almost always trying to distract me from my own pain.
- To have a heart so warm it could heat the homes of my haters.
- To have a spirit so strong I own every instance I am the hater, the bully, the tongue sharp as a broken mirror.
- To be good to people without investment in being seen as a good person.
- To be guided by giving instead of getting.
- To live in a bungalow of kindness.
- To bend over backwards in yoga class only - To not shapeshift to fit the expectations of society that is yet to see all the ways it is sick.
- To know every leaf, every river, every sunrise is a child saying, “Watch me! Watch me! Watch me!”
- To repeatedly meet the euphoria of being thankful in moments I am told gratitude is impossible.
- To sweat through my shirt with nervousness in public and love myself more for it.
- To put my foot in my mouth and keep smiling.
- To deny no part of my life the word “life”-––even what feels like life’s antithesis.
- To live like I’m kissing the universe on her temple.
- To make sure everyone I love knows how much I love them.
Dear Things That Don’t Suck Subscribers –– do you know how much I love you? Thank you so much for being here. I would truly love to hear about what you hope to see and achieve in this life that can happen right where you are.
Love, Andrea, 🖤 a Bride-Groom of Amazement.
News & Updates:
△ I was recently on the ‘Sounds True’ podcast, with Tami Simon. In the conversation we discuss many topics, including the ways my diagnose changed how I navigate issues of social justice, how I no longer feel separate from those I previously might have thought of as my enemies, and how I have learned to care for my spirit while caring for a world that is in pain. If you’re not familiar with Sounds True, please check them out. Their teachings have been changing my life for the better for years. Listen to the episode.
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A New Kind of Bucket List