When there are no easy answers, where do we begin?
Finding landscapes vast enough to hold what we can’t solve alone
Welcome. Heartbeats is a nurturing community for caregivers + creatives to connect, collaborate, and find spaciousness for life's complex questions. The best way to support our community is to become a paying member for $8/mo (or $2 a week, less than a fancy cup of coffee🍵).
Our first virtual Community Art Share is next Friday, May 16th. Sign up to share your art or join us to connect with other creatives in a supportive environment.
Our next Connection Circle gathering is on May 21st from 10:30 AM-12:00 PM EST. Visit the Connection Circle Hub 💞 to register (limited to 10 participants).
Hello.
There’s a skin-toned band-aid covering my left elbow after a lab draw and another attempt to understand my body. I entered the office with tentative hope (how often have I been dismissed, hurried, scared to take up more time/space?) and left with an aftertaste of too simple answers.
A mismatch to my circling questions.
I hold the messy prescription in my hand, not quite trusting the remedy. What about the problems without easy-to-swallow anecdotes?
How can I explain the need for inquiry without immediate solutions? The desire to find a partner in piecing the puzzle together, slowly over time?
“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I’ve witnessed it again and again in healthcare. The desire for fast and reproducible cures that cause more harm. Top-down systems that create infallible experts and disempowered patients. The intuitive, complicated inner workings of mind, body, and spirit reduced to separate organs and structures (some deemed unnecessary and removed because we can’t (yet) comprehend their purpose in the greater whole).
But this is not about the body.
This is not about healthcare.
I move around the essence of it, pondering, slowly pacing.
What’s at the core?
We could talk about politics. How the desire for action has become a demand for bigger and bigger reactions.
How the vocabulary we use and the labels we assign to others so easily fragment and fracture whole persons and countries.
We could discuss faith and fanaticism. Holy longing turned dogma, doubt exiled to those whose unbelief and lingering questions do not deserve a place at the table of grace or capital T truth.
We could talk about landfills and corporate greed. How consumerism is consuming us, a ravenous hunger with an insatiable cost.
In every category, there’s a feeling of individual responsibility. The weight of solving the climate crisis, the question of a crumbling educational system. There are legislators and senators to call, causes to advocate, and national parks to protect.
In a constant state of urgency and desire for tangible results, what are we missing?
What meandering streams of nourishment and insight flow unnoticed far below the surface?
What ways of being together and creating ripples of collective responsibility are we failing to cultivate?
Ways to share not just the responsibility but the opportunities, too?
When I was in nursing school, I was repeatedly told that my patients' survival and well-being were my sole responsibility. Here’s an example used frequently: “If the doctor wrote the wrong prescription and the pharmacist filled the wrong prescription (didn’t catch the doctor’s error) and you (the nurse) gave the patient the wrong prescription, it is your mistake. You are the last line of defense.”
This way of thinking and training is so deeply ingrained in my bones, I still have nightmares about patients falling out of bed or entering a room and not knowing what to do or how to “fix” the person in the gown, depending on me to save their life.
It’s followed me beyond the confines of healthcare, eluding an abandoned career, yet still evident in the invisible weight of the world on my shoulders, the way I curl my body inward to carry the burden of what I’ve failed to piece back together.
“Sometimes you can’t fix what’s broken,” I’ve started gently telling our toddler, as a reminder to treat his belongings and others with care. And maybe, as a way to protect him from the heaviness of expectation.
How does this relate to our place on the map of humanity?
To our mortal bodies?
To systems that were never designed to be fixed in the first place?
“If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
--Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I held a different set of mysteries in my heart when I traveled to Iceland on a solo trip— my first time back to Europe after ending a long, cross-continent relationship with a person I hoped to spend the rest of my life with.
Alone without him, I meandered through landscapes that stretched my understanding of what it means to be a mere human on this extraordinary planet. With no pretense, I was greeted by wide, vast prairies dotted with sheep and two-lane gravel roads. Looming glaciers and ice-filled lagoons. Hot, steamy fields gurgling below my feet and pure, thundering waterfalls emerging from emerald green mountains.
I had so many questions.
Somehow, in this place, empty of anything but raw beauty and danger, I could let them be. I left them lingering, free to be held by something so much bigger than me.
Bigger than my fault or love.
Bigger than time and fate.
In the absence of needing to understand or find the answers, something shifted. Room for a new story to emerge. One I hadn’t yet imagined and definitely didn’t expect.
I am reaching for that possibility again now— a way for us to find freedom beyond answers that leave hollow cavities in our chest and country. Beyond solutions that sever the whole of who we are and negate our connection to life.
“Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”
—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I am peering and reaching, walking and believing, whispering into that sacred landscape, big enough to hold it all.
All my love,
Mariah
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about my trip to Iceland or how to plan a similar, backpack-style vacation, check out this post on my old school travel blog. 😊🎒
Your Turn.
I’d love to hear from you!
What landscapes - physical or metaphorical - have given you the freedom to hold questions without immediate answers?
When have you felt the weight of responsibility for something too complex to "fix" alone? How did you respond?
How might we create more spaciousness for each other when facing complex problems without simple solutions?
What practices help you resist the cultural pressure for quick fixes and remain present with difficult questions?
COMMUNITY RESOURCES 🦋
You’re invited: Heartbeats Community Art Share 🖌️
Our first virtual Community Art Share is next Friday, May 16th, from 8:00 PM-9:30 PM EST
This is a FREE opportunity to gather in community and share your art in a supportive, welcoming environment.
Sign up to share your poem, dance, idea, sculpture, or visual art and receive generous feedback and encouragement. Sign-ups for sharing your art are limited to 5, but even if you don’t share this time, it’s a great chance to build community and connect with other creatives!
Join a Heartbeats Connection Circle 💞
Hang out with other messy, creative humans and caregivers creating space for unanswerable questions, collaboration, and community.
Our next session is on May 21st from 10:30 AM-12:00 PM EST.
These intimate Zoom gatherings (limited to 10 participants) are a nurturing space where we can share our challenges, celebrate our wins, and work alongside other creators and caregivers who understand.
Upgrade your subscription to register for all future Connection Circles at our Connection Circles Hub 💞 and join us in the chat weekly! 👇
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Intuitive 1:1 Tarot for Life's Complex Questions 🎴
Often, having a compassionate space to ask questions you’re afraid to face alone can provide the grace and wisdom you need to move forward. As a reader with 10+ years of experience, I’m offering a limited number of sessions this month to help you reflect and tap into your inner guidance.
Start with a 15-minute oracle reading, or choose a 30-60 minute reading to explore a situation or question in-depth and help you orient toward your North Star.
Reserve Your Spot (4 spots available this week) ✨
"Mariah's reading created a spaciousness I hadn't experienced before. She helped me see that my questions themselves were valuable, not just the answers I was desperately seeking. I left with a renewed sense of possibility." —Alexia
Shop my favorite books 📚
If you enjoyed the quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you can support this newsletter by purchasing your own copy on Bookshop, an independent bookseller that benefits indie bookstores (instead of Amazon). I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Or, check out some of my other favorite reads. 😊
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig - A philosophical journey exploring quality and the integration of analytical and intuitive understanding
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn - A thought-provoking tale that challenges our assumptions about civilization and our relationship with the Earth
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer - An exploration of consciousness and freedom from the limitations of habitual thinking
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Iceland is such an amazing country! Otherworldly landscape. You feel like you’re on another planet. For me, the ocean is a place where I can leave those unanswered questions.