When things are meant to flow, sometimes they just flow. Quickly. Especially when creativity and the right timing intersect.

I started a book last month, Transformations of the Sun: 122 passages on finding new life after loss. Originally I anticipated an October publication date, then I realized I was moving fairly in writing it, so October became September.

This weekend I found myself sitting with 112 completed passages out of the 122, and I realized this book will be done by the end of May, and my wonderful publisher at Golden Dragonfly Press is graciously accommodating an August publication date.

After not working on a book for a year, and contemplating what it means to be a writer who isn’t writing, this book assembled itself in a month. I guess the story was just ready to be told…

It’s taken me a while to put my pieces back together in Kauai. This time last year I was deconstructing my Alaskan life in preparation to move to this island. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a psychologist anymore, I had a massive solitude wound which was suffering from too much busyness, obligation, responsibility, and otherness. I knew I had creative and spiritual gifts trying to manifest, but I couldn’t quite see the where or how.

Reconstruction hasn’t always gone as planned. I expected my path to manifest quicker than it has, and now I see this first year has been an incubation period where I have had the gift of space and germination and time to come to terms with my own self. And time to grieve; I still have bits and pieces of shrapnel from the loss of my brother that surprise me with their intensity.

Even though I was initially impatient when I got here, I see now time has been my friend, and many things have changed in my life in a year’s time.

A year ago, I finally wrote a post on this blog about sensing my brother in the afterlife and the gifts that opened up in my life after he passed. I was so nervous at the time, I felt like I was spiritually coming out of the closet. And yet there was liberation there too- I had a whole other side of my story I hadn’t been telling, and when stories sit inside of you too long they become heavy and they alienate.

Untold stories make you feel like you don’t belong.

I don’t like labels- they are constrictive and the minute you use them they create a lens of perception that often has judgment and expectation attached. Yet we have to use language to describe our experiences the best we know how. So when I first began finding the words to tell my story, I used the words spiritual, psychic, intuitive, angelic, gifted and six sense fairly interchangeably.

What to call myself? I didn’t know, I grabbed at language the best I could.

And now I’ve come to realize, that those words fall so short and flat. My experience of self and with spirit is so multi-dimensional. These experiences have become a part of who I am, they are not separate from me- meant to be labeled in boxes and kept in a closet, only taken out around those who believe such thing.

They are who I’m created to be.

So I can embody them and grow in them and walk a deeper path of love, peace, and grace. And the freedom and grace that has come from living in Kauai has given me space to own them, claim them, and embody them in greater ways.

I’m so profoundly grateful for that, as I have more clearly seen in the process of writing this book that part of me was suffocating inside. She didn’t have enough space to breathe and let her lungs expand or find her wingspan. She craves solitude and nature and time in daydream so she can connect things beyond herself.

And back in Alaska she didn’t feel particularly valued, understood, or seen for the most beautiful, sensitive, perceptive parts of herself. Now, here in Kauai, I’ve realized that all along it was simply me who needed to value, understand, and see me.

We have to learn to be our own best friend in this life. Because when we become our own best friend, we begin to give ourselves permission to live in such a way that our lives become deeper and richer as our experience of self is always validated, appreciated, and loved.

It’s taken me a while to catch up with myself, to shrug off what others may think, and just be me without excuse or explanation or defense or presentation. But somewhere along the time line from last year until now, I’ve stepped into my self and the woman I needed to be.

And I like her. She’s not afraid anymore. She doesn’t have to be kept hidden.

She is living what it means to be free.