Remembering Forward

I was born in a world that didn’t know itself yet. A world before Wi-Fi and instant answers, before every thought could be Googled, before a thousand voices could speak into your day before you even got dressed.

Back then, we waited. For the radio to play our favorite song. For the movie to come back to theaters. For the boy to call on the house phone and maybe talk to your mom first. We waited and wondered and imagined.

I was raised in a single-channel universe, Catholic, small-town, Midwest. Where deviation wasn’t dangerous so much as… unthinkable. It simply didn’t exist. No one I knew believed differently, lived differently, loved differently.

Except me.

Even then, something in me pulsed. I didn’t have the language, but I had the frequency.

I knew it when I skipped mass and walked the creek bed instead. When I watched dragonflies stitch patterns across the sky and felt the universe watching me back.

I knew it in the way I loved, recklessly, endlessly, like it was a form of divinity. In the poems I scribbled in spiral notebooks. In the way I spoke to the stars like they were old friends. I didn’t know I was awakening. I just knew I didn’t believe the church bulletin.

And now decades later, after trauma and tech and ten thousand reckonings, I realize something astonishing: I’m returning. To the wild-eyed girl who made out in the woods and believed in magic, who felt God more in starlight than scripture, who could see through the veil before she even knew there was one.

Because that’s what awakening does, it doesn’t teach you something new. It hands you back what was stolen. Your wonder. Your knowing. Your original aperture.

And maybe that’s what we’re all doing, those of us who remember dial tones and maps that folded, who remember when freedom didn’t need to be streamed or shared, maybe we’re here to remind the others that knowing everything was never the point. Feeling everything was.

But somewhere along the way, we got scared to feel. Because feeling meant remembering. And remembering meant reckoning. And reckoning meant we might not survive the flood of everything we’d buried to make it in a world that wanted us numb. So we traded wonder for certainty. We traded awe for algorithms. We traded our trembling, aching, radiant aliveness for the illusion of control.

But here’s the truth I’ve come home to:

It was never about knowing more. It was always about feeling deeper. That’s the way back. Back to the wild-eyed girl. Back to the creek bed. Back to the pulse of something divine that was never in the building but always in your body.

Feeling is not the threat. It’s the invitation. And your heart, your whole, brave, cracking, blooming heart, was never the problem. It was the compass. You were never being tested. You were being trusted to find your way bacK home to yourself by remembering how to feel.