Introduction
My masterclass on I AM turned on one motion: returning to the point within you which radiates the experience of you.
These are the smaller bits of this motion — four short pieces, each a single facet held up to the light on its own. A path and a greenhouse, the epiphanette, grace: none of them the whole of I AM, each of them an aspect worthy of consideration. They are contained on purpose, the way a seed is container — something to sit with, to expand, to follow deeper when it blooms and resonates.
A Path Leads Away
A path has a geometry, and the geometry is honest even when the promise is not. Physically and in our minds, a path leads away from where you are, right now, in this moment. Plus, a path implies a destination. And a destination implies you are not there yet.
So when life gets described as a journey, something comes riding in with the picture of achievement. Go on your journey. The path demands doing. And performing. And achieving.
There is always a toll, and the toll is paid in effort spent getting beyond your complications, as if the complications were the gate and the doing were the fee.
I AM has a different geometry. Not a line pointing somewhere else. A point, radiating. I AM is about experience, about presence. About what moves toward you instead of what you chase after.
I spent years walking down paths that led away from me. Now I stand where I am and let the road wonder where I went.
I am here.
The Greenhouse
A greenhouse works by putting everything in one place. You gather the seedlings in under one roof to see how each one grows, how each germinates, how each does its thing.
And then something happens that the seed packets don't often mention: crossover. Things influence each other in ways you didn't anticipate.
A life full of ideas works the same way. When enough of what you love sits growing in one place, something starts emerging that you didn't plant.
When the unexpected thing appears, there's a choice. Push the new growth back in its box, slap the label on, and tell the thing to behave and be what you thought you were growing.
Or ask the greenhouse question: something is emerging here, something is being different than what I expected. What is this? And what is this connected to?
I keep choosing the question. The label was only ever truly mine anyway.
The Epiphanette
An epiphany arrives with lightning and a soundtrack. An epiphanette arrives while you're doing the dishes.
Epiphanette is my word for the tiny shift that moves you out of the mind-fuck. Out from under the gaslighting that says you're crazy for sensing what you sense, for feeling what you feel.
The epiphanette is the small clean moment of: Oh! I don't have to do it that way. I could do it this way.
Small is the point. A tiny shift that is deniable to every authority and totally undeniable to you. Nobody can take an epiphanette away, because nobody else witnessed the emergence.
I collect them now, my epiphanettes. They're how I found out the door to my truth was never actually locked.
I Am Grace
Give yourself grace. The advice is good, and the advice still has the shape of a task: one more thing to give, one more thing to do, one more way to fall short on a day when the giving runs dry.
There's a way to hold grace that isn't a task: the sentence turned from giving into being. I am grace.
Said that way, the I have to do this falls away, and the I have to do it a certain way falls away with it. You stop administering grace to yourself in doses and you exist within grace instead. Grace stops being a transaction between you and your judgment and becomes a place to experience life.
Amazing grace, the song calls it. I am beginning to think the amazing part is how close grace was the whole time.