from healing to healed

"Body like a mountain, Heart like the ocean, Mind like the sky." - Dogen

Brittney Liberation Day 2022. At one of my stops on today's driveabout, I walked around looking for interesting rocks and picked out five, one for each year of this anniversary. (Looking for interesting rocks has always been a family pastime. Encouraged especially by my mother, who will almost always come back from anywhere, even a walk to the park, with interesting rocks in her pockets.)

This day has always been partly a celebration of new personal freedom, partly a commemoration of what started that journey. The annual look back to acknowledge how far I've come has helped me embrace the changes that followed from that day, to lean into them instead of letting fear make my choices for me.

But I've done what I needed to with that. It was a gradual thing, but I realized today that how I feel about this little holiday of mine has shifted from healing to healed. What a profound gift. (One I earned, just to be clear -- if you've ever done the work of your own healing, you know that shit is *hard*, and you damn well better take the credit for doing it.)

So I decided that this is the last year I'll mark this day as an anniversary. Going forward, my context for this day will solely be about continuing this journey of personal liberation, this lifelong project of a life of intention.

What a good day.