The spider’s web is web of protection around art-making, around play, and around intentional community. It is an offering for spaciousness from social media. This work allows me to take time with my daily practice, with myself, and with my communities that feels easeful in my body. I hope that these offerings will bring you more ease and consideration in your own body. You can find me here, on my IG @meredithannewhite, online booking, and my website. Thank you so much 🤎
I’ve been on a journey redefining “work” and what my own creativity can really look and feel like as a sustainable practice. I’ve been traveling, climbing, meeting more humans, and experiencing each day as an offering. Within that, it takes consistency for my work to make itself available to me. So creating the time to show up with y’all no matter where I am or what’s going on around me feels really good. This particular writing brings me to the threshold of love.
Maybe growing up I thought that someone was going to find me and show me how to love. They would tell me that I am wanted, and therefore I didn’t have to do much in order to receive it. That particular love would be the constant in my life forever. That person would become the thread that stitched all of the disparate parts of me back together into a new quilt. Maybe they mended the holes in my heart like the holes of a tattered wool sweater or the worn back pocket of my favorite pair of jeans. I believed that it would be easy. That person would always be as I met them as. The world would change around us. This love would be the dependable circumstance amongst which I would create all of the other pillars of trust around.
It seemed like the more I looked to those around me for examples of love, the more I found love as an interchange for comfortability. Maybe love was the dependable plate of spaghetti after a long day at work. It was a love that allowed ends to meet. Love as reassurance from all of the other unknown factors in the world that scare the shit out of us. We stay looped to them like the news echoing through my childhood home every morning and evening even though no one is really watching. We operate around this love as if we are supposed to know it’s there although rarely outwardly expressed.
As a kid, that kind of love felt very different to me than the love I found when I went to the creek to tell the turtles about my day. It felt different than exploring the woods behind my house and witnessing mother deer nurture their babies with quiet observation. It felt like a different kind of love than collecting shells on the beach as the tide repeatedly touched my toes.
Maybe this kind of love was also unspoken. But this unspoken language consented with love as an offering. The presence of a baby turtle or mother deer was not owed to me. It was a gift. The turtles that sunbathed on logs some days but not all were blessings. The shells on the beach that housed small sea creatures never came home in my bucket. The mother deer that ushered their babies onward after they were grown began to show me the presence of seasonal shifts. This love was not something I could hold onto forever. It just meant that this love was constant because the constant that it was tethered to was change.
When I begin to tether myself to a certain kind of love, I have to come back to remembering. I have to remember to come back to myself often. This remembering is a practice. It’s a practice that often gets tossed out pretty quickly when the idea that the love I carry for my people will continue to run smoothly and efficiently all of the time. Relationship, however, does not work that way.
If life has taught me anything, it’s that love doesn’t just happen to people. Love dips into the spaces of in-between. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. We get to show up with varying identities around love. And if that love changes, so too do the containers of love if we so choose it. People come and go. I get to choose to show up with love anyways.
It means that me loving you really hard means that I practice showing up with boundaries. It means that I am better able to communicate the ways I feel wronged, cared for, uncertain, and excited. It means that love as an active choice is taking the time to have the conversations. It means that choosing love often means choosing myself. It means that love is something I commit and recommit myself to every morning, afternoon, and evening. It means I allow myself to feel the full spectrum of emotions. It means I continue to come back to love as the intent in which I live my life even if it feels easier to harden.
How do I continue to show up for myself while loving others?
We’re offered the chance to tether ourselves back to ourselves with hope and faith and the unshakeable truth that is love. Some journeys wind alongside us for a while. Some journeys head in an entirely different direction than what we anticipated. It’s easy to want to hold tightly to what once was as opposed to what is now. It brings me right back to my practice of remembering. I remember my own journey. The journey that curves and loops back on itself and is deeply solitary at times and other times is surrounded by many. It means that I take space for my practice. I take space to show up in community in very intimate ways. I take space to write these newsletters and be with the bees and practice tarot and lay outside.
So what if we treated people like the beautiful shells on the beach that sometimes get washed away with the tide?
Because loving is an active choice, and I choose it even if it means heart break.
I send you a whole lot of love.
You can find me here, on my IG @meredithannewhite, online booking, and my website. I have tarot and reiki offerings on a weekly basis that can be exchanged locally in Atlanta or digitally. Please feel free to reach out with any questions that you may have.
With gratitude,