We celebrate two hundred fifty years of this nation and honor the men and women who dared to imagine it into being. We are the daughters of their courage, carriers of a vision that refused to die even when the odds were impossible. We stand at a threshold now, in a moment that feels like breaking. And sometimes breaking has to happen before we remember who we are. In shamanism we call this a dismemberment—the falling apart that comes before we gather ourselves back together, whole and remembering. This is our time to hold steady, to tend the flame we carry inside ourselves and pass it to each other.

Women know something about holding life through darkness. We have carried babies in our bodies, kept them safe for nine months, brought them into the world, nurtured them through their becoming. Some of us have done this literally, some of us through the children we've mentored, the generations we've guided, the dreams we've protected. We know in our bones how to keep something precious alive when everything around us is chaos. That same fierce knowing lives in us now. We protect our own soul essence, our own trajectory, our own life purpose the way we protect new life. We do this for ourselves and for each other, because that is our sacred work.

So tend yourself. Read the books that feed your spirit. Walk by the water and let it remind you who you are. Talk with the women who know you, who see you, who hold your center when yours wavers. Support the artists among us—the ones creating beauty in dark times, the ones refusing to let the light go out. Wear something that makes you feel like yourself. Do the small holy things that keep you anchored. The center holds when we hold it together.

America was built on violence and subjugation, and chicanery and confidence men and shenanigans and corruption, but it is also this amazing expression of human possibility.
— Former President Barack Obama

Happy fourth of July...Happy 250th!