After A While by Veronica Shoffstall. One of my all-time favorite poems. 💐

Lao Tzu wrote this over 2,500 years ago. "When the great Tao is forgotten, virtue and morality arise. When knowledge and intelligence are born, the great pretence begins. When there is no harmony within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused, and in chaos, loyal officials appear." At first, that might sound strange. Isn't virtue a good thing? Isn't loyalty something to praise? But here's what I think he was gently pointing out.... We only invent words for what's missing. You don't need a rule about "kindness" in a room where everyone already loves each other. You don't need to announce "I'm devoted" when harmony is just… how you live. Think about your own life.... When was the last time someone had to tell you they were honest? Or prove they were loyal? Probably in a moment when trust was already broken. Lao Tzu isn't against virtue or loyalty. He's inviting us to look deeper. Before the word "respect", there was simply seeing the person in front of you. Before "gratitude practice", there was a quiet heart, already full. So here's my gentle question for us all this week.... What if we stopped trying so hard to be good, and started simply listening for the harmony that's already there? Not the loud, performative kind. The quiet kind. The way your child laughs without reading a parenting book. The way you helped a stranger without pausing to call it "compassion." The Tao was never lost. We just forgot we were already living inside it. Let's remember together. With Love ❤️ Always Mark A pen and ink drawing i made of Lao Tzu in 2016

Spending more time outside during the summer solstice has me thinking about our relationship with sunlight. Nature doesn't seem to force energy into existence. It receives it. Plants don't strive harder to create life. They receive sunlight and transform it into living tissue. Rivers don't force themselves to flow. They simply follow the landscape. It made me wonder how often I try to manufacture energy instead of creating the conditions to receive it. The last few days, I've spent hours outside in the sunshine, and I've noticed I have more energy than I do after another cup of coffee. That surprised me. Maybe receiving is an active relationship with the things that allow us to thrive. An active surrender to the wisdom woven into life. I'm beginning to wonder if peace isn't something we create, but something we remember when we stop fighting against the rhythms that sustain us. What helps you return to that place? P.S. I thought this picture goes well with this, my son in a power stance under the sky.

Hi Everyone 👋 A few evenings ago, I found myself walking down a familiar hill as the sun began its slow descent. The light was golden, the air was still, and for a brief moment, everything felt beautifully ordinary. Then my gaze fell upon the local middle school. Its iron gates, those tall, unyielding, black metal bars were drawn shut, padlocked, and silent. The children were gone. The playground was empty. And yet, I couldn't stop staring at those gates. Because it struck me, right there on that quiet street, that those gates are not just gates. They are a mirror. We begin our lives inside such gates. We are dropped off at school, handed a timetable, and told to sit still, comply, and stay within the lines. We learn early that there are boundaries we must not cross, questions we must not ask, and dreams we must quietly shelve because they don't fit the curriculum. The gate locks behind us, and we don't even notice. Then we graduate, step out of one gate, and walk straight into the next. We find a partner, fall in love, and before we know it, we are caged within the unspoken rules of that relationship—the compromises, the expectations, the roles we must play to keep the peace. We go to work, and there we are again: a desk, a title, a salary, and a set of invisible bars that dictate our time, our energy, and our sense of self-worth. We climb the ladder, but the ladder is inside a cage. We buy a house, and suddenly we are caged by a mortgage. We scroll our phones, and we are caged by algorithms designed to keep us anxious, addicted, and endlessly comparing. And eventually, we die, and we are placed in a box, lowered into the ground, and the gates close one final time. But here is the uncomfortable truth I have come to realize: the gates are not the real problem. The real cage is the one we cannot see. It is made of our beliefs, our fears, our conditioning, and our desperate need for approval. It is built from the stories we have been telling ourselves since we were old enough to listen—stories about who we should be, what we should want, and how we should appear to the world.

I've been reflecting on worthiness lately. Somewhere along the way, a lot of people internalized the story that worthiness has to be earned. Maybe you learned at a young age to get the attention you needed from your caregivers by bringing home all A's. Or being the fastest runner on the track team. No one told you it was necessary for you to do these things to be worthy of love or support. But that's the message many of us received from the world around us. Then years later, we find ourselves underpaid, underappreciated, or stuck in patterns that feel far too familiar. So we try to think our way into feeling worthy. If we just have the right mindset. If we just heal enough. If we just become a better version of ourselves. The challenge is that our bodies often carry an older story. A story shaped by experiences, expectations, disappointments, criticism, rejection, and all the moments we learned it was safer to be who others needed us to be than who we truly were. I've found that some of the most powerful shifts happen when we stop trying to convince ourselves we are worthy and instead allow ourselves to experience it. When we slow down long enough to notice what it feels like to belong to ourselves. When we remember a moment we felt fully alive, fully present, fully ourselves, and allow that experience to take center stage again. Over time, those moments begin to tell a different story. Not a story about becoming worthy. A story about remembering that we already are. Because the truth is, you are worthy because you exist. You are here. What helps you feel most connected to your sense of worthiness?