March is when I start believing things again. It is a very reasonable month that way. The light comes back — not all the way, not yet, but enough. The world starts looking like it might cooperate with something. After the January-February stretch, which requires a certain determined optimism that I will admit is not always effortless, March feels like someone opened a window. Not all the way. But enough for the air to change.
In March 2023, I was preparing for a significant change. By May, I would be moving to Santa Fe. The decision had been a long time in the making and had to do with a number of things I won't fully detail here, but at its center was something simple: I needed to be closer to my people. My sister. Not because I was falling apart — though I had my moments, as one does — but because I understood at a bone-deep level that living near the people you love is not a compromise. It is a choice that pays interest in every direction.
I wrote "Another Day in Your Life" in the middle of March, on a morning I woke earlier than intended and couldn't get back to sleep and sat at the kitchen table watching the sky move through its sequence — black to grey to something that was trying very hard to be gold. I was thinking about purpose. About what it means to be given a day: not for your own agenda, not for your to-do list, but so you can show up for someone else who needs someone to show up.
I have lived long enough to know that sometimes your presence in someone's life is the exact thing they needed and you had absolutely no idea. A phone call made on a whim. A note sent for no particular reason. A knock on a door before the alternative became real. These things matter in ways that are rarely tracked or acknowledged. The day was given to you so you could do that thing. Not the grand gesture — just the presence. Just the showing up. Just you, specific and available, at the right moment.
Another Day in Your Life
In God's design, an extra day bestowed, Not for your need, but for love's path it showed. A gift, not sought, nor selfish desire, But to ignite a purpose, set souls on fire.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →March 2023 was the month I started saying yes differently. Not yes to everything — I have made and continue to make significant progress on the art of the purposeful no, which is a skill that took me decades to develop and I remain in active practice. But yes to the things that involved showing up for people. The things where my being there was the whole point. I made a mental list of those things, and I started doing them. After weathering a challenging season, I anted to take more risk in saying yes to situations that would create beautiful moments.
Two months later, I drove to Santa Fe. That decision — to choose proximity, to choose family, to choose the life with more support in it — was a very large, very deliberate yes. And the whole spring of 2023 was its warm-up. The treck across the country was not without its challenges, a broken axel on the trailor I was pulling with the carefully selected pocessions that was granted permission on this journy. I walked away from 30 years of memories and belonging that were dear to me. I needed to shed thd old, to make room for this new chapter. Giving space for a postive new begining. Filled with sorrow and a renewed optimism and feeling of wonderful things to come.
You were given another day. That is not a small thing. That is not a thing to scroll past. The question the day is asking you — quietly, in whatever light is available — is what you're going to do with it before it's over.