You're invited to a journey with and celebration of Emily for her 30th birthday!

On September 27th of 2016, I will turn 30 years old. Finally. I feel life has been aiming me towards this point for a while now. Somehow, more than any age so far, this one seems a destination. There is something about crossing the threshold into 30 that feels important to mark. My 20's have held so much, and I can tell my 30's will grow me in ways I cannot imagine. I know I have arrived somewhere, but the territory is new. The time of my birthday is always a transition into Fall as well, carrying with it the invitation to arrive anew, some layers shed. And so, I request your love and presence to help create and celebrate this rite of passage with me, in person or in spirit.

I'm inviting you all to join me / co-create with me some birthday time. I'm opening the magic celebration portal, today through when we feel complete. I know my schedule and everyone's is crazy, and each of us offer ourselves to the spirit of birthdays and rite-of-passage differently, so here are a few seeds about how we could...

• simply spend an morning, afternoon or evening together being sweet you-and-me
  
• take me out for a night on the town (seriously, I'm already an old lady, I never go out ;p
  
• create a ceremony-type celebration as a group
• getaway to dive deep and have a blast beyond the city lights
• and of course, eat delicious food
  

These are the dates I'm holding open...

• Saturday Sept 24th - Sunday afternoon 25th
• My actual birthday, September 27th
• Evenings of October 14/15/16th
• Weekend of October 22-23rd
• Weekend of October 29-30th
• and of course various windows in between (just naming weekends here to keep it simple)

May I be initiated into my 30's with all the wisdom and absolute absurdity life has to offer. I will continue dreaming into what this time may hold and ask you to do the same. I welcome everyone's ideas, consider this an invitation.

Please let me know how you are inspired to spend time with me, and when you're available, via email, or just call me :) I'll see how it's all coming together, scheme with Jed, and get back to you. It may be we're meant to just spend a special morning or evening together you-and-me, or plan a whole thing, for some we might not get to it until later this Fall (hence the open portal)... I trust whatever is right will be revealed.

~ Thank you for being my people ~

Enjoy these quotes and pics below, to stir up the love!

"FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness... A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them... But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone." - David Whyte

"Walking, I am listening to a deeper way.
Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me.
Be still, they say.
Watch and listen.
YOU ARE THE RESULT OF THE LOVE OF THOUSANDS."

-Linda Hogan

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Lost

Stand still. 
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost. 
Wherever you are is called Here, 
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, 
Must ask permission to know it and be known. 
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, 
I have made this place around you, 
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven. 
No two branches are the same to Wren. 
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, 
You are surely lost. Stand still. 
The forest knows Where you are. 
You must let it find you.

- Native American Elder Story

"Lovers of God, sometimes a door opens,
and a human being becomes a way
for grace to come through."
- Rumi

"I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you 
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human."

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here." - Alan Watts

"We are made for unending meeting and exchange... We are something for the world to run up against and rub up against: through the trials of love, through pain, through happiness, through our simple everyday movement through the world... Nothing stops the body’s arrival in each new present, except death itself, which is intuited in all cultures as another, ultimate, intimate form of meeting. Nothing stops our ageing nor our witness to time, asking us again and again to be present to each different present, to be touchable and findable, to be one who is living up to the very fierce consequences of being bodily present in the world." - David Whyte

“God and I are like two fat people in a tiny boat,
we keep bumping into each other and laughing”
– Rumi

“You don’t stop laughing because you grow old;
you grow old because you stop laughing”
- Mary Burmeister

"Place everything you can perceive –
Everything you can
See, hear, smell, taste, or touch,
Upon the altar of this moment
And give thanks.
It is over so soon –
This expression,
This single moment of your precious life,
This one heart
Pounding itself open
With fear or wild joy,
This one breath rising
In the cold winter air
Smoothly and gently
Or coughing and sputtering,
Bow, while you can, before
This one taste
Of afternoon tea
Warming its way to your belly,
Or the fragrant orange
Exploding its sweet juice
In your grateful mouth.
You have to love
The antics of your mind,
Imagining life should only be sweet.
The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.
It is whole, like you,
Before you think yourself to pieces.
Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,
And give special thanks for such grace
That wakes you up from sleeping through life.
Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,
Yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.
In this moment,
Your eyes meet mine and there is a single looking.
What is peering from behind our masks?
Can it touch itself across the room?
Place your palms together;
Touch your holy skin.
In another moment it will shed itself.
What will you be then?
What were you before you had two hands?
What are you now?
You cannot capture That
And place It on the altar of this moment.
It is the altar,
And this moment’s infinite expressions,
And the Seeing,
And its own devotion to itself.
You are That."
~ Dorothy S. Hunt

"God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
 then walks with us silently out of the night.

 These are words we dimly hear:

 You, sent out beyond your recall,
 go to the limits of your longing.
 Embody me.
 Flare up like flame
 and make big shadows I can move in.

 Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
 Just keep going.  No feeling is final.
 Don't let yourself lose me.

 Nearby is the country they call life.
 You will know it by its seriousness.
 Give me your hand."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

"The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to all its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will, to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned."

- David Whyte

"Those who want to follow the Way of Beauty must break away from cultural dictatorship and move out into no-man’s land where everything is new and unknown. They must learn to live outside of stereotypes and worn-out attitudes, and free themselves from any bonds – roles, ties, ideologies, interests, or habits – that might hold them back. They must learn all over again, without fear or hesitation, to be themselves."

- Piero Ferrucci