Why I Use the Word "Sovereignty" A Lot Less These Days

Have you ever considered how a knot can be both a terrible tangle of string or an intricately crafted design, like in those ancient Celtic manuscripts?

Right now, I have knots on my mind but, once upon a time, like three years ago, every story I told was woven around big idea: Sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a gloriously complicated word (as all the best words are, like love, freedom, mystic, petrichor, onomatopoeia).  As I understand the way sovereignty works in my own life, it's about personal agency, the quest for self-knowledge, and the commitment to greater wisdom. In my lived understanding, it is about channeling that power to help others find their sovereignty so the collective can become more equitable, healthy, and evolved.

When we all have access to our own sovereignty, then we can pool our strength. And when that happens, we just might have a chance of cleaning up our act and cleaning up our earth.

Of course, sovereignty has its other aspects. It's a word that describes the borders of nation states. And, it is a word that can be applied to how you wish to control the borders of your own body. Reproductive rights are a matter of deeply important body sovereignty.

When you reflect on a phrase like “body sovereignty,” it makes sense that folks who question the validity and the necessity of the Covid vaccine call on "sovereignty" as one of their reasons for resisting the shot. (Of course, sovereignty tends to get lost in the midst of all the conspiracy theories, and that is a separate yet inextricably related issue best left to other writers to explore on another day.) 

It’s important to note that by "it makes sense" I am saying that I understand that certain people who are attracted to the concept of "self-governing" choose to call their anti-vaccination position a "sovereign" stance. What doesn't make sense to me is how folks would willfully risk place even more strain on a healthcare system that is at its breaking point and further jeopardizes populations that truly can’t be vaccinated. 

That said, I'm not seeking a conversation about vaccines right now. (Really, please don't email me about what you think of the politics, science, or spirituality of the shots. That's not why I am telling you this story.)

Instead, I am writing about vaccinations and the discourse around them because I've been quietly pulling back from "sovereignty" for a while, and it felt important to tell you why.

As creatives, we fall in love with a new idea and describe its development in detail. It's all too rare that we describe why we're taking stock, pulling back, and allowing the past season's words to serve as compost for the new ideas to come.

We'll leave this part of the conversation here: back when I wrote The Sovereignty Knot, I advocated sovereignty in service to the collective because, then as now, there's no wisdom in imagining every decision you make is yours alone.

These Days, It's All About the Knot

My book, The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic, came out in February 2020, just as this novel coronavirus was starting to make headlines. Never could I have expected our world to be tied in such unspeakable knots and to see sovereignty come up so often in conversation. 

In light of all the individual and collective struggle of the last two years, the knot seems even more compelling–and full of creative potential–than my original concept of sovereignty.

The knot allows for the reality of the tangle and the beauty and strength of deliberate design. It lets us be who we are. The knot also allows us to do better, weave our words and actions more intentionally, and recover from past mistakes. 

The knot is about commitment and the ties that bind. The knot is about community and the support that comes with sharing ideas, asking hard questions, and living in the uncertainty together.

In Light of All This, I Am Committing to the Knot Throughout 2022

Here are three ways to join me as we spiral through the knots and work out the tangles as we go:

The Open Writers’ Knot is the first free community writing practice of the year. It's coming up next Wednesday, January 19 at noon ET.

When we write together, and form a community even for an hour, we strengthen the creative container and all gain the courage to confront the knots of narrative and ideas that may confound us when we write alone. This event is for writers and non-writers, leaders and dreamers, seekers and wisdom keepers who are ready to meet themselves on the page

As I hope you’ve heard by now, the KnotWork Podcast debuts on 2.2.22.

The new show is devoted to untangling our myths and reweaving our stories. Each episode features a story from mythology or folklore and a deep dive discussion into why that old tale still matters to us today. Please follow the show on Instagram and Facebook, and plan to subscribe to the show in a few weeks!

• Finally, the Sovereign Writers' Knot, my online community, will form again in early March for another 13-week journey.
  
  If you’re seeking a supportive community and a creative incubator to conceive or continue your writing project, this could be the ideal group for you.

What Story Is Mine to Tell Right Now?

Whenever I find myself spinning in circles and I have the urge to write,  I ask myself:

What story is mine to tell right now?

This is the essential question, whether my mind happens to be looping with anxiety or leaping with inspiration. 

(Have you noticed how they both tend to buzz at the same frequency? The nerves of worry and the nerviness of creativity are easily confused. When I ask this question, there’s a better chance of moving toward healing and productive cross pollination. That’s when the words finally start to flow.)

So Much To Say, So Hard to Find the Words

From my experience, “what story is mine to tell right now?” is the only place to begin when you feel the pressure to put words on the page and feel wordless at the very same time.

Here’s something we tend to forget when we’re overwhelmed and there is so much to say, either because the brain is swirling too fast with worry or soaring with new ideas: we writers can only set down one word at a time. 

“One word at a time” is the blessed miracle and the maddening flaw of language. 

We are forced to condense the immense and the ineffable into clusters of letters, limiting it all down to discrete, interconnected units of ideas. With time and focus, we spool a narrative. We can throw ourselves wide open to the expanse of sentences, stanzas, and stories. 

Here’s what might happen when you dare to ask, “what story is mine to tell right now?”

When I ask myself this question, I am almost always surprised. 

Sometimes, I need my journal and quiet hour. I must fill the page with rhetorical questions, nonsense sentences, and magnificent, revelatory errors of all kinds.

(When I wrote into this prompt yesterday, I definitely scrawled “when I know when I must right…” Cringe! But look what was revealed in that misspelling! Oh, my obsession with being correct, even on the uncensored pages of my own little green book)

Sometimes, the words take me to fairy glens and eighteenth century drawing rooms.

(Ok, so the novel got stalled in the transition between the endless 18-month summer and the uncertain fall, but there’s a book brewing, and it’s the story I was born to tell. When I give myself the freedom to describe a sacred well made of starlight and sphagnum moss or invent a whispered conversation between the countess and the peddler down the lane, I trust that I am making magic. You transform the very fabric of the world when you conjure and describe you own visions, stitch by stitch and word by word.)

Sometimes, the words come out seeking their place in the marketplace, issuing invitations to come play. 

(I’ll be the first to say that the “real writer” in me rolls her eyes at this naked display of capitalism, but then I remember that we live in a both/and universe. As the Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins says, “poetry doesn’t pay,” but the mortgage still comes due. And so, I ask my words, as they emerge one letter at time, to call in the writers, the healers, the dreamers, and the sovereignty seekers who will hear my song and use these ideas to add to their own. So, next time you see my images on Instagram, do read the captions, too. They’re lovingly crafted by a writer trusting the story that wants to be told.)

Sometimes the story is a text to a friend. Sometimes it’s an email to my grandpa. Sometimes it’s a note I stick in the lunch box in case second grade feels hard today. 

And sometimes the story that is mine to tell must be silently pounded into the pavement or held by the trunk of a beloved tree. Sometimes the story that is yours to tell is not yet speech ripe and will not come no matter how fine the pen, how quiet the room, how inspirational the view.

Trust the story. Trust the moment. Trust yourself.

The words will come in their own time, as they always do: one at a time, in a jumble or a flow. They will carry you onward to the story you must tell.

“What story is mine to tell right now?” is just one of many questions I pose to the dreamers, healers, and seekers who long to build a writing practice and birth their stories into the world.

In the Sovereign Writers’ Knot, the newest incarnation of my online writing community, you can find the the space, time, and company that will help you bring your words into the world.

We are welcoming new members through September 29. Learn more and apply now.

It's Time to Tell Stories That Are Rooted In the Earth

Last night, I helped my dad put together a slide presentation for his condo association. He’s passionate about bringing in solar power to fuel their community energy needs.

This past weekend, my husband and I looked out on our beloved backyard and wondered together about how we could make our family’s life more sustainable. We’re thinking about changing the way we buy and use electricity, how we can change our eating habits, and what food we can grow in the years to come.

As headlines about ecological catastrophe and systemic climate change vie with the latest Covid spikes and variants at the top of every newscast, these conversations seem inevitable and necessary. 

We all need to talk about our relationship with the land, with our resources, with survival, with creating a world where our children and their someday children can thrive.

Right now, I don’t know how to tell a story that isn’t rooted in the soil, soaked in the rain, singed by the fires, and aware of the climbing temperatures.

I may not be writing about the climate directly, but I find I am always in conversation with the Mother, with the Earth, with all the unseen interactions between humans and nature.

When we were visiting Maine last week, my aunt gave me three plants. 

A white sagebrush from my mother and a periwinkle from my grandmother that grew beside the houses on Cape Cod where I grew up. Both homes have since been sold. And then, a primrose that my great aunts grew on Prince Edward Island. That place is still in the family, but it’s not possible for us to cross the border to see the Canadian cousins right now.

Three plants from forbidden gardens, from patches of land that have become inaccessible for one reason or another. 

Three living beings that I can tend and touch, cultivated by beloved gardeners I can only visit in my memories.

Three delicate root systems I can protect and pray over, that (hopefully) will help me keep my family history alive.

How’s your relationship with the plants and soil that surround you?

I find myself wandering between my flower patches right now. I talk with the trees that have been here for decades longer than our house. I check on the perennials I have planted in my time here. I welcome these new plants and celebrating the bittersweet legacy of growth and change they represent.

This sense of finding solace and purpose amongst the blooms and blossoms is new to me. I’ve tried to make the place look pretty for the thirteen years we have lived here, but I usually tend to lose interest by August. Luckily, when September rolls around I can stick a new crop of mums in the ground to cover all the worn summer blossoms.

It’s different this year, however.

My new devotion to this rocky soil and the flowers I coax from the dry earth is inspired by my increasing awareness that our global environment is in trouble, surely. There’s something more to it, though. Something more personal and even more primal. 

It was my husband who helped me see another dimension of the story. During our conversation about the future of the planet and how we can be better citizens of Earth, I marveled at how my relationship with our nearly two acres of garden, lawn, and forest had deepened over time.

“Isn’t that part of becoming the crone?” he asked. “The wise woman?” (Why yes, that guy I married has read—most of—my book.)

I write about the way we’re princess, queen, and wise woman through life in The Sovereignty Knot, of course. I write about how the concerns of the queen shift to encompass the awareness of the wise woman. The story becomes most true as you live it, however.

As my girls grow older and my business matures, I find myself switching gears. I don’t have to engage in constant mothering and I’m finding I’m less concerned with being the in-control queen. At 42, though I certainly have lots of queen energy in my life (and princess energy too), I am consciously moving into the wise woman’s sense of being present and receptive, into the crone’s sense of conscious care and divine surrender.

This planet needs us all to step into our wisdom in new, beautiful, challenging ways.

We’re being called to live a bolder, wilder, more compassionate story. We need to focus on the plants outside our door as we think about the ecosystems that enable us all to breathe. We need to set down the old ways of being and open our arms wide to a new devotion to the world as-it-is.

We’re going to need to get more centered and more Sovereign than ever so we can make the choices that support the human and the non-human collective. 

As I’ve said before in many spaces, Sovereign is never meant to be a synonym for selfish. Instead, it’s an interconnected system of sovereign selves that can transform and heal this world.

Let’s be sovereign beings for the beautiful, burning sovereign world. One seed, one story, one wise act of creation at a time.

Make Your Writing Desk a Sacred Space

In the early 1980s, a woman drove north from Massachusetts, crossing the Canadian border and continuing on until the little red Datsun reached the ferry terminal. She and her parents and her small daughter, only a toddler, boarded the boat to Prince Edward Island.

This family, always growing, shrinking, and changing according to the dictates of time, had been driving up to the Maritimes to go “home” to see the relatives since the first generation emigrated to Boston in 1949. We still do (or rather, we will as soon as the word reopens).

I always miss the Island, just as I miss my mom, my grandparents, and the great aunts and uncle we used to visit every summer. Usually, those feelings intensify once June rolls around and I can sense, even from hundreds of miles away, that the lupines are filling the ditches and the water in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is almost warm enough for swimming.

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash

Right now, though, my PEI memory cup is overflowing. I’m imagining one particular road trip when I would have been in a car seat and mom purchased “the desk.”

The desk was - and is - a converted organ that was bought at an auction or some cattle barn that was converted into an antique shop when the farmers stopped working the land and corporate agriculture came in. This lovely old thing sat at the bottom of the formal staircase at my aunt and uncle’s 19th century farm house for two decades. 

It was always “Jeanine’s desk” even though this wasn’t her home and it seemed like she’d never claim it. Finally, Mom and I rented the perfect sized minivan and brought it back with us the summer I got my first apartment.

That was seventeen years ago. 

This desk has moved with me a few times. It has moved around our current house, too. Though I love it, it’s far from ergonomically sound, so it has become something of a storage chest and dumping ground.

But then, I started a new project. 

My new novel is set in the Ireland of two thousand years ago, in the time of the druids, with bits of 18th century Dublin woven into the story, too. As I begin what is bound to be a mammoth undertaking, I’m digging through college lecture notes, combing through genealogical records and ordering scandalously heavy boxes of new books. 

The past feels more present than ever before.

And, even if my new writing project doesn’t involve my ancestors in particular, I am feeling the presence of thrice great grandmothers I have never met as surely as I am feeling my own beloved, more recently departed relations.

We Are Called to Create Our Own Sacred Spaces

Rather than spending the Easter holidays at mass as all my Catholic forebears would have, we devoted our days to shifting furniture and sorting family papers. I have emptied my office, my shelves, my altar, and am still in the long, slow process of putting it all together.

I wasn’t called to find holy sanctuary in a church. I never really have felt that call. Nature has always been my cathedral. And now, I am re-sacralizing my own office as my sanctuary.

It feels so natural, and yet, so new.

Unconsciously, I had always understood this as a sacred creative and healing space. Whether I am working on my own fiction, pulling tarot cards for a client who is trying to find her creative direction, or helping an entrepreneur find the words to describe their own sacred healing work, something special happens when I close the door and devote myself to this kind of writing and conversation.

Now, I realize that I need to create my creative workspace in a deliberate, sacred way.

After this year when our workplaces have changed so much, when we’ve lost access to the libraries and coffee shops that once were our intellectual and creative refuge, it’s more important than ever that we have our own sacred spaces to draft and craft and brith something new.

How Will You Create Your Own Sacred Creative Space?

How will you create your own sacred creative space? I have no idea! I do hope you’ll send me a note or tag me when you share photos of the place where you’re currently making magic or will soon be making the next wonderful thing.

Here are a few ideas that may help you get started...

1. Keep it simple. The goal is to find clarity and inspiration and then start making something magical, NOT to get distracted by the endless details of redecorating. (Making a space beautiful and liveable is a deeply creative act, of course. Just be aware of whether you’re using “I need to make this the perfect sacred space” as an excuse that keeps you from getting to the page and spinning out your stories.)

2. Consider what direction you’ll face. Factor in the light and the warmth of the room, as comfort is an essential part of the sacred creative experience. Also think about whether you’re someone who writes in the morning or at the end of the day. Do you want to face the rising sun (even if you can’t see it)? Is it important that the full moon would shine on your desk at a certain point each month?

3. Make re-sacralizing easy. If you use this space for many activities, from paying bills to doing work for clients, can you shift the energy in the space to call in that certain sacred, creative energy that the most personal projects require? Maybe you light a certain candle or purposefully clear the space of the detritus of the day before you begin.

4. Be comfortable. The reason I was really able to bring this storied desk back into my office and work at it full time? There has been a revolution in home office supplies and I had a million options to choose from when it came to adding a keyboard tray to this piece of furniture that used to be a musical instrument. When I had tried to use this as a desk ten years ago my husband rigged something from scrap wood. There was so much love in those rough boards, but damn, was it ugly! When you (re)create your space, value comfort as much as you value sentiment. 

5. Listen for guidance and look for signs. Part of my quest involved suggestions from an ancestral healing session. My grandmothers from Limerick and Mayo wanted me to call in the family heirlooms as I set the scene for my next book. Your guidance may come from the ancestors, your spirit guides, or the call of the birds. Dare to tune in and heed your intuition.

We Can Write Together, Each In Our Own Sacred Space

In the Sovereign Wisdom Circle, the online community for healers who write and writers who heal, we gather to write together twice per month. We also gather to learn and laugh and share and explore.

Through April 7, we’re welcoming new members to the group. If you’ve been looking for a community that can support you as a healer, a writer, and an entrepreneur, this is the group you’ve been hoping to find.

Come On, Let's Play

Heyyyyy you guyssss!

(Did you hear that come through in my best playground voice?)

I’m going to use that outside voice a little more often, ok? It’s not that I want to yell at you, it’s that I want to spark the kind of joy and movement all too many of us left behind on the playground.

This morning during a deep talk with a deeply insightful coach of mine, I came to realize how careful and delicate many of my communications have become.

Somewhere along the line, I traded sales pages for “invitation pages” because that felt less pushy and gross.

Somewhere along the line, I also traded the copywriter’s tricks (bold headlines and emphasizing pain points) for the gentle voice of a tea party hostess.

In many cases, my soft voiced suggestions seem to have gotten lost in the din of the digital world. With the chaos of the daily responsibilities and the worries about the wider world, it’s no wonder the people I most wanted to reach weren't hearing me.

Here’s What’s True

I am a multifaceted creature who offers up the magical and the practical, the tender and the snarky, the sacred and the mundane in equal measure. I value tears and empathy, but sometimes we all just need to laugh until it’s funny and find the way to healing with a megawatt smile.

And so, I say, come play with us, come write with us on Friday, March 1 at noon ET.

You need to make it to this free Community Writing Practice because you need to meet yourself on the page. You need to make space for the stories, the old memories, the sorrows, and the surprises too.